First edition, first printing [trade issue]. Publisher's original blue cloth with dark blue titles to the spine, in the first state dustwrapper. An excellent near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout and without previous owner's inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the lightly rubbed and nicked dustwrapper which is a touch darkened to the spine and remains entirely without loss. Correctly priced 7/6 net to the spine. An excellent example, scarce in the dustwrapper.
Published in 1939 as the world was teetering on the brink of global war, the author's tragicomic social-political dystopian novel has become a widely acknowledged classic of science fiction, and a powerful warning from the past. As a testament to it's literary merit, and ever the marketeer, Victor Gollancz also issued a "Special Presentation Edition" (as with Du Maurier's Rebecca the previous year), comprising 200 copies with a slightly different dustwrapper design sent gratis to leading stationers and high profile booksellers to generate orders. (Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 194).
Stock code: 17624
£450