The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - Numbered Edition

PRE-ORDER PRICE: $650
PUBLICATION PRICE: $695

A searing portrait of a young woman's struggle for identity and of the world that closes around her, The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel, and one of the most widely read books in American literature.

The story chronicles the slow unraveling of Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student facing a profound identity crisis while coming of age in 1950s America, as she navigates the pressures of society along with her own ambitions. After earning a coveted summer position at a prestigious New York City magazine, Esther finds herself struggling with the looming expectations of marriage, motherhood, and giving up on her dreams to achieve them. As she grows increasingly disillusioned with the life laid out for her, her mental health deteriorates, ultimately leading to hospitalization and psychiatric treatment.

First published in the United Kingdom under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, The Bell Jar is considered to be in part autobiographical, mirroring the author's own descent into mental illness. Plath died by suicide a month after the novel's UK publication. Scholars suggest the author began writing the novel in the spring of 1961 after publishing her first collection of poetry, and may have finished in August of the same year, though subsequent changes were made throughout the editing process.

Plath had applied for the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, affiliated with publisher Harper & Row, and was awarded the grant late in 1961. It required her to submit the finished manuscript to the Saxton committee; the editors who read it found the novel "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought," and the book was turned down. Early working titles included Diary of a Suicide and The Girl in the Mirror. When it was published in the United States eight years later, The Bell Jar, as it had come to be known, became an instant success. While praised by critics and peers alike, The New York Times perhaps said it best in their review: "Esther Greenwood's account of her year in the bell jar is as clear and readable as it is witty and disturbing… not a pot-boiler, nor a series of ungrateful caricatures; it is literature."

Deeply intimate and universally resonant, The Bell Jar remains one of the twentieth century’s most powerful literary achievements—a novel whose honesty, beauty, and emotional force continue to captivate readers more than sixty years after its publication.

The limited edition of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is presented in two states: Numbered Edition, Lettered Edition and Designer's Edition.

NUMBERED EDITION

• 5½" x 8¼" trim size.
• 304 pages.
• Limited to 250 copies.
• Signed by Peter K. Steinberg, Harriet Lee-Merrion, and Sonja Ahlers.
• Millimeter-style binding, fully bound in cloth with printed-paper sides carrying a different illustration by the artist front and back; cloth left exposed along the fore edge.
• Letterpress-printed paper label on the spine of the book and clamshell.
• The title page and chapter openings are printed in a second color, requiring an additional pass through the press.
• Printed letterpress on Mohawk Via Laid.
• Housed in a clamshell enclosure.
• Endsheets are Takeo Tant Select, a Japanese paper with a subtle double-sided emboss.
• Handmade cloth endbands.
• Includes a new afterword by Peter K. Steinberg.
• Letterpress printed bookmark with all pre-orders.

Published editions may differ slightly from mockups and prototype designs.
Illustrations © 2025 by Harriet Lee-Merrion
Calligraphy © 2025 by Sonja Ahlers