Nineteen Eighty-Four
Price: $3,000.00
Original Wrappers. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949. First Edition. Good.
First edition, Advance Review Copy. Publisher's white wrappers, lettered in red. About very good, with light toning to spine, some staining to wrappers, light spatter of red ink to front wrapper, and abrasion to top right of front wrapper. Overall, a bright copy, very clean internally. 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 strictly 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 though is dependent on words." The first American edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four was published just five days after the first British edition. Item #GO034
