Okay SO this is one of my favourite books I've found because it taught me about the Taiwanese book pirating moment in the 80's / 90's and I looooove cult objects like this.

The fascimile pages were all scanned, the Taiwanese printer in the book copyright section, and the classic flip of the surname on the spine. All flags of an unauthorised English-language edition, produced during the late-20th-century “pirate publishing” period. This was when presses in Taiwan reproduced Western literary and academic texts with their first edition or valuable edition look for regional circulation. These editions are not scarce in a traditional rare-book sense, but are increasingly collected as material artefacts of informal literary economies and Cold War-era knowledge circulation.

The story Mantissa is John Fowles being meta. It's a compressed, abrasive novel structured as a series of arguments between an author and his unruly muse. Drawing on classical myth, psychoanalysis, and postmodern theory, the book stages authorship itself as a contested space—gendered, performative, and unstable. It sits late in Fowles’ career, closer in spirit to Borges or Barth than his other books.

Edition note: Unauthorised Taiwanese paperback. Offset printed. Noticeable cover wear and spine creasing consistent with age and use.