Brave New World.
New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1932. First U.S. edition, first printing, trade issue. Hardcover. This is the first U.S. edition, first printing, trade issue, very good in a good dust jacket. The brown cloth binding is tight and respectably clean with a slight forward lean, bruised lower rear corner, and some dulling of the gilt at the center spine and spine ends. The contents are clean with no spotting, no soiling, strong red topstain, and only mild age-toning. The sole previous owner mark, contemporary, is initials, surname, and “Dartmouth ‘35”, inked on the upper front pastedown. “FIRST EDITION” is so stated on the title page verso. Slight differential toning to the endpapers corresponding to the dust jacket flaps testifies that this copy has spent life jacketed. The dust jacket is unclipped, retaining the original “$2.50” upper front flap price, and substantially complete, with minor loss substantially confined to the flap fold and spine extremities. The jacket shows moderate overall soiling and toning, wear to extremities, and a closed tear extending 1.5 inches up from the lower flap fold and angling an additional 2 inches across the lower front face. The dust jacket is protected beneath a clear, removable, archival cover.
“In summer 1932 Huxley published Brave New World, which enhanced his fortunes and reputation as the best-known British novelist between the wars. It was an international best-seller, particularly in paperback editions in the 1950s, and was translated into twenty-eight languages. The novel, the first about human cloning, is a dystopia set five centuries in the future, when overpopulation has led to biogenetic engineering. Through computerized genetic selection, social engineers create a population happy with its lot. All the earth's children are born in hatcheries, and Soma, a get-happy pill, irons out most problems.” (ODNB)
One imagines reading such a book – this very book – about a dystopian utopia at the very moment when Hitler’s Reich, with its racially homogenous "Volksgemeinschaft” aspirations, was ascending, seemingly unopposed. When it was ostensibly read by the Dartmouth student who owned it in the mid-1930s, they may have reasonably assumed themselves on the safe side of the Atlantic Ocean, far from both literary and actual dystopia. Less than a decade later, Hitler’s purportedly Aryan armies invaded the low countries and France, the Wehrmacht’s legions equipped with millions of Pervitin pills – a belligerent equivalent of Soma – allowing soldiers to stay awake for days at a time and march many more miles without rest. One wonders if the Dartmouth student who owned this copy was part of the vast American force that helped to scourge Europe. Item #008502
Price: $1,500.00