diff --git a/NEWS b/NEWS
index 8aef82e2..b952c274 100644
--- a/NEWS
+++ b/NEWS
@@ -4,6 +4,8 @@ What's new in psycopg 2.4.1
   - Use own parser for bytea output, not requiring anymore the libpq 9.0
     to parse the hex format.
   - Correctly detect an empty query sent to the backend (ticket #46).
+  - Allow to specify --static-libpq on setup.py command line instead of
+    just in 'setup.cfg'. Patch provided by Matthew Ryan (ticket #48).
 
 
 What's new in psycopg 2.4
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index 90244a9a..17eada11 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -133,6 +133,7 @@ class psycopg_build_ext(build_ext):
         self.mx_include_dir = None
         self.use_pydatetime = 1
         self.have_ssl = have_ssl
+        self.static_libpq = static_libpq
         self.pg_config = None
 
     def get_compiler(self):
@@ -263,7 +264,7 @@ or with the pg_config option in 'setup.cfg'.
             sys.exit(1)
 
         self.include_dirs.append(".")
-        if static_libpq:
+        if self.static_libpq:
             if not self.link_objects: self.link_objects = []
             self.link_objects.append(
                     os.path.join(self.get_pg_config("libdir"), "libpq.a"))