The Doors of Perception
Price: $600.00
Woodcock, John. Hard Cover. London: Chatto & Windus, 1954. First Edition. Very Good / Dust Jacket Included.
First edition, first printing. Publisher's periwinkle cloth, with spine lettered in gilt; in its original multi-colored pictorial dust jacket designed by John Woodcock, with an illustration of three eyes with geometric irises to the front panel, lettered in white. Very good book, with staining to cloth (primarily rear board), toning to spine ends and upper edges of boards, and offsetting to endpapers; very good unclipped dust jacket, with toning to spine, shallow chipping to spine ends, a few chips to panel edges, and some spotting to panels. Overall, a bright and attractive copy. The Doors of Perception is Huxley's reflection on a mescaline-induced psychedelic experience he had in May of 1953. After offering himself up as a test subject, Huxley was administered a supervised dose and, as he explains via William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "the doors of perception were cleansed." In his introduction, Huxley explains: "The other world which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact…. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation - the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence." While criticized for its promotion of psychedelic drug use, The Doors of Perception was also a foundational text for the 1960s counterculture, inspiring both Timothy Leary's psychedelic research and Jim Morrison's band The Doors. In 1958, Huxley published a sequel - the essay "Heaven and Hell," which refers to the two possible experiences one will have after breaking through the "doors of perception." Item #AH032
