Tutuola’s first book, published by Faber and Faber of Russell Square — the house of Eliot and Pound — and the book that carried West African writing into London literary publishing. The full title runs The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town.
The jacket summarises the premise with some relish: a man whose father was rich enough that he grew up to do no work but drink palm-wine, who tapped the trees himself until it interfered with the drinking, and whose friends became uncountable until his tapster died. After what the flap calls “a melancholy experience of friendless water-drinking”, he sets off — “rather like Orpheus in search of Eurydice” — to find his tapster in the Deads’ Town.
The back flap is the more revealing document. It promises the European reader adventures “one would have supposed to be indescribable”, told in “direct and simple English, most captivatingly tinted by reflections of his native idiom”, and assures him that before he has turned the first page he is himself a palm-wine drinkard. The condescension and the enthusiasm are hard to separate, and both are part of how the book was received.
Printed in Bristol by Western Printing Services. The Library also holds Ekwensi’s People of the City, published in London two years later — the two books that opened the London market to West African writers, and neither of them a Heinemann paperback.
Date to confirm. Faber set publication dates in lowercase Roman numerals. The line on the imprint page reads “First published in” followed by numerals that OCR renders as mcmlii — 1952, the year of first publication — but the scan is not sharp enough to be certain, and I could not tell from it whether a later reprint line follows. Worth reading off the copy: it is the difference between a true first and a later impression.
