NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR

First edition: (vi), 312 pages, green calico textured cloth on boards, off-white endpapers, purple topped leaves, purplish red titling on the spine, in the first issue red dust jacket.

The spine in slightly faded and with similar fading around the edges of the boards, bookseller’s ticket at the base of the front paste-down endpaper, the contents are crisp and bright, the binding is tight with only a very slight lean. The dust jacket printed in red is frayed and torn along the top and bottom edges and at the spine. With the number W.469 and 10s. net on the front flap, now preserved in a Brodart protector.

A very good copy in the first issue red dust jacket.

Fenwick (Gillian) George Orwell, a Bibliography, St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1998, A.12a (pages131/132), 'Published 8 June 1949. 10s 9d, 25,575 copies printed. By the end of 1949, 22,700 copies sold. There is another state of the first issue with a green jacket.'

'Nineteen Eighty Four' was published in London by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949 and in New York by Harcourt Brace on 13 June. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters includes an amalgam of excerpts from two letters in reply to questions from Francis Henson of the United Automobile Workers, in which Orwell further explains his aims in writing the novel:

My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling in could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas on to the logical consequences. The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph everywhere.' (Fenwick, page 130).