Animal Farm by George Orwell
£900.00
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Secker & Warburg, First Edition, Second printing, 1945.
Supposed to have ben printed in May, 1945, the publication was delayed until August due to war time paper shortages. Original green cloth boards with white gilt lettering on the spine. Clean end papers and very clean contents. War time issue paper quality in very good condition. Original Dust Jacket in good condition, minor wear on edges and small tear top right as seen in the images. "Important Titles of 1945" on rear panel. Fine edition published in the same month, August, 1945, as the first printing; in a very good dust jacket with the original price of 6s still visible on the front flap of the jacket. Small singing of previous owners name in ink before title page, top right corner. A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket. Had no repairs professional or otherwise. A rare example of copy in an original jacket, a notoriously fragile production.
'The author's brilliant short novel now regarded as a minor masterpiece of twentieth century literature. Although it took only three months to write, the gestation of a short fable to express Orwell's growing dissatisfaction with the USSR and Communism in general had been some six years in the making.
Orwell flippantly dismissed the work prior to publication as "a little squib, which might amuse you when it comes out" (letter to Gleb Struve, Feb 1944), adding prophetically, "it is so not O.K. politically that I don't feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it."
Within a month, Orwell's long term publisher and supporter, Victor Gollancz, had refused the manuscript out of hand, as had several other publishers. T.S.Eliot, though rejecting it on behalf of Faber, clearly admired the work, "a distinguished piece of writing... the narrative keeps one's interest on its own plane - and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver."
Writing later, Orwell concluded; "it was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."
Malcolm Bradbury describes it not only as "the most important work of fictional political satire to be written in twentieth-century Britain", but appositely as, "the first British post-war novel, not least because... it decidedly influenced a new lineage of liberal and socially attentive writing in British fiction".
Supposed to have ben printed in May, 1945, the publication was delayed until August due to war time paper shortages. Original green cloth boards with white gilt lettering on the spine. Clean end papers and very clean contents. War time issue paper quality in very good condition. Original Dust Jacket in good condition, minor wear on edges and small tear top right as seen in the images. "Important Titles of 1945" on rear panel. Fine edition published in the same month, August, 1945, as the first printing; in a very good dust jacket with the original price of 6s still visible on the front flap of the jacket. Small singing of previous owners name in ink before title page, top right corner. A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket. Had no repairs professional or otherwise. A rare example of copy in an original jacket, a notoriously fragile production.
'The author's brilliant short novel now regarded as a minor masterpiece of twentieth century literature. Although it took only three months to write, the gestation of a short fable to express Orwell's growing dissatisfaction with the USSR and Communism in general had been some six years in the making.
Orwell flippantly dismissed the work prior to publication as "a little squib, which might amuse you when it comes out" (letter to Gleb Struve, Feb 1944), adding prophetically, "it is so not O.K. politically that I don't feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it."
Within a month, Orwell's long term publisher and supporter, Victor Gollancz, had refused the manuscript out of hand, as had several other publishers. T.S.Eliot, though rejecting it on behalf of Faber, clearly admired the work, "a distinguished piece of writing... the narrative keeps one's interest on its own plane - and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver."
Writing later, Orwell concluded; "it was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."
Malcolm Bradbury describes it not only as "the most important work of fictional political satire to be written in twentieth-century Britain", but appositely as, "the first British post-war novel, not least because... it decidedly influenced a new lineage of liberal and socially attentive writing in British fiction".
Category Literature, Novels & Short Stories