Nineteen Eighty-Four
Hard Cover. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Compan, 1949. First Edition. Very Good / Dust Jacket Included.
First American edition, first printing. Publisher's original gray cloth, lettered in maroon and black; in the original red dust jacket, lettered in black and tan. Near fine book, with light toning to foot and center of spine, tiny spot of soiling to front pastedown and p. 8, small split to cloth at bottom edge of rear board, and mild staining to a few pages (pp. 16-17, 133, 136); very good unclipped dust jacket, with moderate toning to spine, some damage to center of spine with a few small closed tears and a touch of dampstaining, shallow chipping to spine ends, small closed tears to top edges of panels, slightly nicked corners, and light wear along jacket flap joints. Overall, a pleasing copy of Orwell's masterpiece. Fenwick A12.b Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel about a dystopian future in the year 1984. In the future Orwell has created, the totalitarian government controls the civilian population with a detailed system of mental and physical control, including omnipresent two-way TV screens that keep the citizens under constant surveillance. Any criticism of the government is illegal, and independent thought is persecuted as a "thoughtcrime." Even the newly adopted language, "newspeak," which abbreviates many phrases and eliminates words deemed inessential, serves "not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view" of the new totalitarian regime, but also "to make all other modes of thought impossible…. that is, a thought diverging from the [state approved] principles…should literally be unthinkable, in so far as thought is dependent on words." This first American edition was published five days after the first British edition.
Item #GO030
Price: $650.00
