Description
Vantage Press, Published 1960. Hardcover, 191 pp.; 21 cm; First Edition; illustrated with line drawings in text, initialed "RB."
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
![Sigma Phi: A Novel in Poetry and Prose [Signed], photograph 1 of 12](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fepilonian.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com%2F20260929008%2F20260929008_001.jpg&w=3840&q=75)
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Pale blue paper over boards with gilt lettering on spine; bumping increasing to edges and corners, mild shelf wear with some color loss along edges, a small 1/4 in. tear at head of spine and another at top of rear hinge. Binding tight. Inscribed by the author on front pastedown, "Best Regards," and signed with his real name, "Ben Ciscel." Pages mildly toned. Otherwise unmarked. Pictorial dust jacket in blue, red, black and white, with Greek letters sigma and phi and line portraits, priced $3.75 on front flap; several chips and tears of 1 in. or less, increasing along edges and heaviest at spine ends and corners, moderate shelf and edge wear, with some toning, spotting and soiling. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. First and only novel of B. H. Ciscel, copyright holder of record, published under the name John Frederick Rachal; WorldCat records a single library copy. The jacket describes the author as a radar and flight-controls engineer with fourteen patents, an Ivy League master's degree, and work as an ordained minister, then general manager of a Texas electronics company. The story follows Robert Beaupre, a married Wisconsin graduate student on a radar development project at a New Haven university lab, and Mary Fields, the Swarthmore-educated mathematician who does his computations. Their affair is told in dated entries, in prose and in the notes and poems they pass each other, with Robert's own cartoons. Rubaiyat epigraph; dedication to "J. B. C."