The Fate of the Edsel and Other Business Adventures

Brooks, John

Published by Victor Gollancz, Ltd., London, 1963

About this Item

Book is "good, ex-library" with several small green "New Zealand National Library Service" page-stampings and a red "Cancelled" stamping to FFE. No edge-stampings. Looks like a couple of standard library attachments have been removed from the rear endpapers, without causing too much damage. Book remains square and tight but smells slightly musty to us. Dewey decimal number painted to spine of both book and jacket. Jacket might still grade good or better, save that the rear flap has been cut off, trimmed down, and glued to the blank FFE. (Librarians do strange things.) Jacket is therefore pretty much complete, but in two pieces; call it "fair." Not price clipped; original "21/-" price still showing. A compromised copy, but we have placed the bulk of the jacket in a mylar protector (after freeing it from the book, to which it was partially glued down) -- volume is easily read and now looks quite presentable on the shelf. Author Brooks acknowledges the Edsel probably seemed like a pretty good idea when it was OK'd in 1955, but it took two years and a quarter of a billion dollars to get it to market; it was a big rattling boat of a car whose designers were more interested in loading it up with push-button gadgets than with its (tank-like) gas mileage or its (crummy) handling characteristics; there was nothing breathtaking about its boxy appearance; quality control was so bad that literally half the early-delivered models leaked oil or had gadgets that wouldn't work, and at that point it turned out it didn't matter how many tens of millions were spent on promotion (including an hour-long, prime-time TV show!) Book also contains shorter, irreverent business-related essays on price-fixing, bid-rigging, and the stock exchange, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. 182 pp., here reduced from $385. Seller Inventory # 006062

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Fate of the Edsel and Other Business ...

Publisher: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., London

Publication Date: 1963

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Good

Dust Jacket Condition: Fair

Edition: 1st Edition