Whitney Museum, Stephen King "My Pretty Pony" Signed Limited Edition w/Stainless Steele Covers, Matching Case - SK1788

Whitney Museum of American Art. New York. 1988 "My Pretty Pony" Stephen King. Folio. pp. 64. Contemporary artists' book with original lithographed pages throughout designed by Barbara Kruger. Text by Stephen King. Bound in grey cloth covered boards, red leather spine. Both front and back covers coated with fixed sheets of stainless steele, with digital clock mounted on front. From the edition limited to 280 copies personally hand signed by both Stephen King and Barbara Kruger on the justification page. Housed in a custom hand-crafted cloth clam-shell case. The spine bears the title in silver over red embossments. A beautiful production.

Condition: AS New. Mint condition without any flaws.

My Pretty Pony is a short story by Stephen King. Originally published in 1989 as an oversized, slipcased edition (with stainless steel faced boards and digital clock inset into front cover) commissioned for the Whitney Museum in New York as a coffee table book, it was later included in King's collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

Plot summary

An elderly man, his death rapidly approaching, takes his young grandson up onto a hill behind his house and gives the boy his pocket watch. Then, standing among falling apple blossoms, the man also "gives instruction" on the nature of time: how when you grow up, it begins to move faster and faster, slipping away from you in great chunks if you don't hold tightly onto it. Time is a pretty pony, with a wicked heart.

Trivia

In his note on the story in Nightmares and Dreamscapes, King says the piece was originally a flashback scene included in a full-length novel-in-progress in which the grandson was now a brutal hitman reflecting on his childhood. The novel was intended to be published under King's Richard Bachman pseudonym, but the author grew disenchanted with the work, and finally scrapped it entirely.

King references this concept again in the "Sorry, Right Number" screenplay (also collected in Nightmares and Dreamscapes) where a direction states that a character's "pretty pony has done its fair share of running" (indicating that they have aged relatively rapidly).

"My Pretty Pony" is also the name of a fictional indie rock band in "Debasement Tapes", an episode of the TV series Veronica Mars