Books

First edition, the limited "Author's edition", one of 200 copies privately printed, this copy with a loosely inserted slip signed by George, and a loosely inserted single-leaf newsletter from George's Single Tax Library. Despite the work's ultimate popularity, Henry George (1839-1897) initially failed to sell his manuscript. He turned to his friend, the printer William Hinton, to publish this limited edition. Eventually, Hinton's plates were used by Appleton in New York to publish the first trade edition in 1880. Several binding variants are known for Hinton's edition, with variant spine lettering and a blue cloth binding. No priority is identified. George's signed slip is on the headed paper of John W. Lovell Co. In 1883, George authorized Lovell to issue a cheap paperback edition of Progress, which sold out in less than a week. The loosely inserted newsletter is titled "The Single Tax Platform" and dated 1890, from the weekly series that George published in New York City. This copy reprints the resolutions adopted by the Single Tax League at its national conference. In Progress and Poverty, George proposed a single tax: the idea that all taxes, except those on land values, should be abolished. The book proved a particularly significant influence on the nascent socialist movement in Britain: "The decisive impact on modern British socialism in its formative stage was not made by Marx but by the American social reformer, Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty articulated the social protest of the time and channeled it into paths different from those that Marx had broken" (Spiegel, p.497). "The most influential of American works on economics, this book gave its author an international reputation as prophet and reformer. He proposed to abolish poverty and secure fair distribution of the rewards of labor by appropriating all economic rent by taxation, and abolishing all taxation except upon land values. Today the slogan of the single tax still unites the followers of Henry George" (Grolier). READ MORE Octavo. Original purple cloth, spine lettered in gilt and ruled in blind, covers ruled in blind. Housed in custom black cloth solander box. Light wear, minimal loss to spine ends, professionally recased, ghosting of loosely inserted slip to rear endpapers, infrequent foxing and finger soiling to contents: a very good copy. Amex 184; not in Einaudi; Grolier, One Hundred Influential American Books Printed Before 1900, no. 81; Mattioli 1418. Henry William Spiegel, The Growth of Economic Thought, 1991.