Labour Candidate (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. First Edition. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Toning to the spine and edges. Minor marks to the fore edge. Wear to the cover and spine, with some rubbing, chips, nicks and marks. Neat pencil note in the flyleaf. Some minor imperfections to the pages: tiny corner creases to two pages; tiny marks or wear to some pages; very limited foxing in places; two chapters (VII and X) appear to have been lightly marked in pencil, which has later been carefully erased (most of the pencil markings to these two chapters are now barely visible). Overall, in excellent condition for a book of this age: binding is solid; text is clean, tight and (apart from the two chapters with barely visible erased pencil markings) unmarked. 324 pages. ---. First edition, first impression. The total print run was 1,800 copies; 1,300 copies were issued in the present blue cloth for the public, with 500 copies issued in red cloth for the Left Book Club. Copies of this book are rarely encountered on the market. Fenwick B.5. Octavo. Edited by Victor Gollancz, with a foreward by Hewlett Johnson, a preface by Harold Laski, and contributions by George Orwell, John Strachey, Victor Gollancz, and A Labour Candidate. The book is a vigorous attack on the British Communist Party for their support of the Nazi-Soviet pact and their adherence to Stalin's orders to adopt a neutral attitude towards Nazi Germany. It contains two essays by Orwell, "Fascism and Democracy" and "Patriots and Revolutionaries". The left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz (who published Orwell's works) was relentlessly harried by the British Communist Party for his and his writers' opposition to Stalin and Stalin's alliance with Hitler. The Party's hostility had led to membership in Gollancz's Left Book Club falling from 57,000 to 15,000 between 1939 and 1942. This volume was put together in response, collecting articles that had appeared in the Left News and providing a detailed critique of Communist Party policy between October 1939 and January 1941. It was published in March 1941; with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, the Communist Party fully re-orientated to a fervent opposition to Germany. Gollancz meanwhile moved to closer support of the Soviet Union, and decided not to publish Animal Farm due to its implicit criticism of Stalin - this was the final Gollancz book with Orwell's work in it. Orwell's two contributions argue, respectively, that the materialism of the left led them to underestimate the emotional appeal of fascism, and that the revolutionary moment possible after Dunkirk was missed and the ruling class had re-asserted themselves.