The Iron Heel
London: Everatt & Co., 1908. First U.K. Edition, First Printing. [PRESENTATION COPY] Octavo : pp. [viii] 374 : original dark blue cloth with decoration in blind and lettered in gilt : inscribed by London on the front free endpaper : affixed inside fron cover a small news clipping photograph of London captioned in pencil incorporating his printed name : "(Jack London) as her looked Sep 6, 1910." Endpapers tanned; cracked at hinges; light wear to extremities. Item #15816
The inscription reads, " Dear Comrade sweet:- Please remember this is fiction - a warning to all socialists to guard against such a thing happening. Yours for the Revolution, Jack London."
"An apocalyptic vision of the future, The Iron Heel is the story of an oligarchy of American capitalists who seize power at the very moment when a socialist voctory seems inevitable at the polls... The Iron Heel's enduring power comes from its prohecy rather than its prose. As a prediction of how organised labour wouild be crushed by those wose interests it endangered, it was chillingly accurate. It was not to be an oligarchy of capitalist bosses, however, against whom the European ledft would be pitted in the coming decades, but the forces of fascism" (Kershaw, Jack London, pp. 164-65). [BAL 11908; Hanna 2225; Rideout, p. 293; Sargent, p.71; Beliler (1978), p. 126.
Provenance: Sotheby's - New Yprk April 2004 - The Maurice F. Neville Collection; Private collection, Sydney, Australia.
Price: $19,500.00