ORWELL, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.

ORWELL, George. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. London: Secker and Warburg. 1968.

Four volumes, 8vo. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in gilt to spine, typographic dust-jacket designed by Bernard Higton with printed price of 50s to front flaps, blue endpapers; pp. I: xxiii, [1 blank], 574, [ii blank]; II: xv, [i blank], 477, [iii blank]; III: xv, [i blank], 435, [1 blank]; IV: xvii, [i blank], 555, [3 blank], all vols with double-frontispiece; a small area of discolouration to cloth at the base of the spine of vol. II; a few light spots to edges of text-block, minor shelf wear; some light, irregular offsetting from frontispieces, otherwise the volumes are clean and in notably bright jackets; near fine; small bookseller’s label for Henry Sotheran Ltd (at the time located at Sackville Street) to front pastedown of vol. I.

First editions of the first comprehensive collection of George Orwell’s non-fiction writing, bringing together a body of previously unpublished material.

This ambitious, meticulously edited, four-volume edition of Orwell's Essays, Journalism and Letters (most of the contents previously uncollected) was compiled with great care by the author's widow in collaboration with Ian Angus, librarian at University College London, and one of the founders of the Orwell Archive.

Arranged in chronological order, the four volumes (issued simultaneously in 1968), are packed with essays, book reviews, columns, letters and broadcasts written between the ages of seventeen and forty-six (when he died). They offer fresh insight into the richness, complexity, and sheer variety of Orwell’s interests and concerns, casting light on the energies and thinking that fed into the novels. ‘One's first, awed, response,’ Ian Hamilton wrote at the time, ‘is simply to the amount Orwell wrote. How did he manage it?’

Fenwick D12.

SKU: 2124865