Waiting for Godot. London: Faber & Faber, 1956. First U.K. Edition, First Issue. With publisher’s note tipped-in. Pp, 94. Yellow cloth boards with title in red with original pictorial dust jacket. Off-setting to endpapers & with a list of cast members for a performance in the Criterion Theatre, March 1956) written in a neat hand to front endpaper. A fine bright copy.

First issue with the publisher advertisements for their James Joyce titles to rear flap of jacket. A revised and unexpurgated edition was published by Faber in 1965.

Waiting for Godot – which has been famously described as a play in which nothing happens, twice– scarcely seems recognisable as theatre at all. One memorable critical review commented:

‘Waiting for Godot jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars.’