First edition, first issue with adverts dated September 1907. Original red cloth, with gilt titles and decoration to spine. Author's presentation copy, inscribed on publication to the front endpaper, "To Mr & Mrs Hope with great affection from the author Sept. 1907" A near fine copy, with very slight fading to the spine and a trace of wear to the corners but with bright gilt and clean cloth. Discreet book plate on the front pastedown. An uncommonly fresh copy. Housed in a quarter morocco, clamshell box.

Mr & Mrs G.F.W. Hope where Conrad's "oldest English friends". They first met in early 1880 shortly after Conrad had left the Europa and was renting a flat in North London. They shared a common fondness for yachting and Hope would take Conrad out on his cruising yawl, Nellie (immortalised in The Heart of Darkness, the same story in which he used Hope as the model for the 'Director of Companies').
Hope was one of Conrad's sureties when he became an British subject in 1886 and one of the witnesses at his wedding in 1896. He described them to his future wife as, "the nearest relations he had in the world" - Jessie Conrad (Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him)
When married, the Conrads moved to Essex to be neighbours of the Hopes and remained close friends as Conrad moved on to more exalted literary circles, dedicating Lord Jim to them.
The Secret Agent has long been regarded as one of Conrad's finest novels and certainly his most enduring and a key influence on both Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. It is notably rare in a presentation state, there have only been two other copies (inscribed to Elsie Hueffer and Albert Tebb) sold at auction in the last forty years.
"The Secret Agent depicts the atmosphere of Edwardian London in a psychological thriller of the anarchist underworld. Conrad's wit and chivalrous magnanimity are at their airiest in this novel." (Connolly)

Stock ID: 32854