Faber and Faber, London, 1954
First Edition, First Printing: Fine/Near Fine. Beautiful bright near fine plus condition clean book with a magnificent near fine vibrant original unclipped dust jacket.
A superb copy of this book with stunning ruby red cloth boards with sharp corners and no edgewear. The binding is tight and square. Strong, unfaded white titles to the spine. The end papers have one delicate scripted owner name and date of 1954 (in the year of publication), and otherwise are in perfect condition, with no bookplates and no bookstore stamps. The internal pages are clean, bright and flat, internally appearing as fresh and unread but very faint foxing to the end papers.
This original First Issue Dust Jacket with the summary of “Lord of the Flies” on the front flap, (later editions were changed to blurbs), is bright and vibrant in color and received only a tiny touch of restoration to the upper tip of the jacket spine. The jacket presents in magnificent near fine/fine condition and withOUT any of the typical discoloration or sunning to the spine. The dust jacket maintains the strong vibrant colors with no other rips, no chips, no edgewear, no fading, no foxing and no stains. The dust jacket is NOT price clipped and is priced 12s 6d net. A stunning dust jacket, scarce in this condition.
Originally published in 1954, The Lord of the Flies was named to Modern Library’s 100 Greatest Novels List of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s cultural commentators noted that Lord of the Flies was replacing Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye as the bible of the American adolescent. Since then, this masterpiece has established itself as a modern classic. “This brilliant work is a frightening parody on man’s return to that state of darkness from which it took him thousands of years to emerge. Fully to succeed, a fantasy must approach very close to reality. Lord of the Flies does. It must also be superbly written. It is” (The New York Times Book Review).
The themes in Lord of the Flies have been widely debated; however, there are two that are commonly accepted: the tensions between man’s urge for savagery and the controlling nature of civilization, and secondly, the loss of innocence. Golding’s novel is an attempt to trace the defects of society to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.
A very handsome copy of this scarce title in superb condition. Presents extremely well on the shelf.
International shipping via UPS Express.
