LOOKING BACKWARD 2000 -- 1887. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888. Small octavo, pp. [i-iii] iv-vi [7] 8-470, original decorated gray wrappers printed in dark gray and brown, sewn. First printing of the paperback edition. A historically significant edition of this classic, published as "Ticknor's Paper Series of Choice Reading," number 38 extra (June 16, 1888). This edition was issued in June 1888, five months after the hardbound edition was published. Bellamy wrote his publisher in May 1888 "I very much applaud your conclusion to issue a cheap edition at once ..." (letter to B. H. Ticknor, 2 May 1888). The most famous nineteenth-century American utopian novel. "Of nineteenth-century American books, only UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and possibly BEN HUR outsold LOOKING BACKWARD. The book's popularity inspired several reform journals (e.g., THE NATIONALIST and THE NEW NATION) and numerous book-length fictional responses, the most famous being William Morris's NEWS FROM NOWHERE (1890). Between 1888 and the early years of the twentieth century, at least 200 literary utopias appeared in the United States alone, including Bellamy's sequel to LOOKING BACKWARD, EQUALITY (1897). Literary, social, labor and reform leaders as different as William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Gompers, Eugene Debs, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton voiced public support; and at least 165 Nationalist or Bellamy Clubs appeared in America and grew into the Nationalist Party that influenced the national Populist Party. Translation of LOOKING BACKWARD inspired reform movements around the world with especially strong impacts in England, Europe, Russia, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ... During the twentieth century many Socialist, Progressive and New Deal politicians cited Bellamy as an important influence. It is not surprising that in 1935 the philosopher John Dewey, the historian Charles Beard and the editor of ATLANTIC MONTHLY, Edward Weeks, contended that of books published since 1885 on Marx's DAS KAPITAL had done more to shape the thought and action of the world." - Kenneth M. Roemer, Claeys, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, pp. 93-4. Anatomy of Wonder (1976) 2-14; (1981) 1-18; (1987) 1-8; (1995) 1-8; and (2004) II-102. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 163. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 059. Clarke, Tale of the Future (1978), p. 14. Fortunati and Trousson (eds), Dictionary of Literary Utopias, pp. 359-62. Lewis, Utopian Literature, pp. 11-6. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 31. Negley, Utopian Literature: A Bibliography 80. Roemer, The Obsolete Necessity, p. 186. Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985, p. 78. Survey of Science Fiction Literature III, pp. 1246-50. Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, p. 37. Bleiler (1978), p. 20. Reginald 01067. Grolier Club, One Hundred Influential American Books Printed Before 1900 90. BAL 956. Wright (III) 460. Downs, Books the Changed America 10. Adams, Radical Literature in America, p. 57. Wrappers worn at edges, lower quarter of the spine panel missing with loss of publisher's imprint, spine lean, a good copy, internally sound and clean. This first printing of the first paperback edition is rare. Kopp did not have a copy of the first printing in his Bellamy collection. (#165905).
Price: $500.00
No statement of printing.