"TO MAKE LIES SOUND TRUTHFUL AND MURDER RESPECTABLE": FIRST SEPARATE EDITION OF ORWELL'S CLASSIC WORK, POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 1947, ONE OF ONLY 320 COPIES, ISSUED TWO YEARS BEFORE 1984

ORWELL, George. Politics and the English Language. Evansville, Indiana: Herbert W. Simpson, 1947. Slim octavo, original printed tan wrappers, staple-bound as issued.

First separate edition of one of Orwell's final works—one that he "particularly valued"—a pivotal classic on the intersection of totalitarianism and language, one of only 320 copies issued two years before his novel, 1984, and his early death in 1950, a handsome copy in the original wrappers.

"Perhaps no writer in this century succeeded so well as Orwell in portraying the dark confusions of totalitarianism in such crystallizing phrases and images as 'Big Brother' [and] 'Thought Police,'" immortalized in his novel, 1984 (Christian Science Monitor). Orwell was already working on 1984 near the publication of Politics and the English Language, which "owes some of its resonance to the way it foreshadows Newspeak, the great literary device Orwell invented for the novel." In many ways, this classic essay reflects what is widely appealing in Orwell: "its directness and honesty, its plainspokenness, its faith, against all evidence, that human affairs can be conducted morally, its sense of being on the side of ordinary people, not of the sophisticated and powerful… To Orwell the connection between the English language and politics was that the debasement of the latter requires the corruption of the former. 'In our age,' he wrote—meaning, the age of the rise of totalitarianism—'all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer'" (Lemman in Columbia Journalism Review).

Here, in one of his final and most famous works, published two years before 1984, Orwell writes: "political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Already ill with tuberculosis at the time of publication, Orwell would die only a few years later in January 1950. But he "particularly valued this essay and indicated to [publisher] Warburg that it should be included in a forthcoming collection" (Leab 27). "This significant essay first appeared in Horizon (April 1946)… subsequently it appeared abridged in the New Republic, which granted the Typophiles permission for the reprint and 'the author obliged with his consent from Scotland.' Number XIX of the 'Typophile Monographs' [this copy]… There were actually three printings or versions: One was for Herbert W. Simpson (100 copies); one was for the Typophiles (320 copies); and one was for 'the Friends of Paul Bennet' (50 copies)": no priority established. "Whether Orwell realized he was authorizing three versions rather than one, is doubtful" (Leab 27). Fenwick C.679.

Text fresh and pristine, only faint soiling to front wrapper. A scarce about-fine copy.