The Bourne Identity by Ludlum, Robert - 1980

New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1980. Fine condition in bright, shiny Near Fine Dust Jacket. A very attractive copy of a book tough-to-find in collectible condition. The Dust Jacket is NOT price clipped ($12.95). Protected by a removable clear plastic Brodart sleeve. Clean, square, tight, unmarked copy. Sharp corners. Not a book club edition. No remainder mark. No owner's name or bookplate. Basis for the 2002 film starring Matt Damon. Original black cloth. From the Dust Jacket: "The man had been dragged from the sea - more corpse than man. He opened his eyes in the filthy room on the small island or Port Noir, in the Northern Mediterranean. The bullet wounds about his head had been cleansed white by the violent waters. There was one other man in the room; he had waited for the moment when his extraordinary patient would come out of coma. And the stranger was extraordinary. The words he had screamed, the languages he had spoken; he had the body of an athlete, a mind of immense intelligence. 'Who's in this room?' asked the patient. 'I'm a doctor,' said the emaciated man. 'Your doctor. What's your name?' 'What?' 'I asked you what your name was.' The stranger stared helplessly at the walls. 'I don't know.' 'Oh, my God.' So begins the harrowing story of a man with no memory. He is given a name: Jason Bourne. He is a man unknown men recognize and lash out in fear and fury to kill. In Zurich, a woman comes into his life - first as a hostage, then as an ally, finally as the only person on earth who believes in him. 'You cannot be what you are not!' Her credo, an act of faith, sustains him. In Paris, his origins are given substance. Jason Bourne sprang out of Southeast Asia; and words from that past hit him like lightning: Delta, Cain, Medusa, Treadstone… Carlos. He is an international assassin hunted by unseen armies. 'You cannot be what you are not!' Or can he? Is he? The final journey takes Jason Bourne to a quiet, tree-lined street in Manhattan. In an eruption of violence, an elegant brownstone residence becomes a jungle where he had been executed… long ago. In this, his deepest and finest novel, Robert Ludlum has created a man in conflict with forces beyond his understanding, a man in a terrible labyrinth all of us who have ever said 'I can't remember' will recognize. And a woman whose commitments to truth, to instinct born of understanding as well as love, raise her above fiction, for she, too, is everywhere.". First Printing of the First Edition. Hardcover. Fine condition/Near Fine dust jacket. Illus. by Sauber, Rob (jacket art). 8vo. 523pp.