Beyond the Mexique Bay by Aldous Huxley first edition 1934

London: Chatto & Windus, 1934
 
8vo., pale orange cloth lettered in gilt to backstrip, with decorative borders to head and foot; upper edge stained orange; together in the seldom-found dustwrapper (unclipped, 12s. 6d. net); with black and white photograph of a ‘terracotta urn’ (replicating the illustration facing p.164) to the upper panel; map endpapers showing the gulf of Mexico; pp. [vi], v-viii, 319, [i]; frontispiece and a further 29 black and white photographic illustrations; a near-fine copy, internally, clean and bright, with mild compression to spine tips and a couple of faint marks to edges; the dust wrapper very good, retaining much of its colour, some chips, nicks and creases to spine ends and along the rear flap fold; a couple of dark marks and splashes along spine; a superior example, nonetheless. 
 
First edition. 
 
Beyond the Mexique Bay was Huxley’s third work of travel after Along the Road (1925) and Jesting Pilate (1926). Here, the author focuses on Central America, namely Guatemala and Mexico, exploring a ‘new territory, lands of a fantastic beauty and the seats of great and vanished civilisations’ (dust jacket). The trip, which Huxley made by boat through the Caribbean, was purportedly undertaken to cure a particularly vehement bout of writer’s block. The previous year, he had made a start on Eyeless in Gaza, his sixth novel, and one which was to follow directly on the heels of his widely-lauded Brave New World, but struggling with the concept, he and his wife left for the West Indies. After leaving the ship in Jamaica, they landed in Guatemala, where they persuaded the owner of a coffee plantation to take them by mule to Mexico. The story is recounted here with much artistic flair, and would later be fictionalised, appearing in Eyeless in Gaza in 1936. 
 
Scarce in the dust jacket.