Books

First Edition, First Printing. Per Sullivan, while the title page reads MCMIX it was actually printed September 25, 1908 in a run of 5,310 copies. Ironically, the subsequent American edition is dated 1908 on the title page. x, 297, [1], 6 ads. Pale green cloth lettered in gilt and ruled in blind, top edge gilt, fore and tail deckled, final two leaves of ads beginning with Herbert Paul's Stray Leaves are uncut. Spine just faintly faded and a few trivial tains to the front cover, offsetting to the free endpapers, otherwise an uncommonly clean and sharp copy. *Orthodoxy* was Chesterton's first and greatest explicitly Christian title and his most enduring work of non-fiction. Revered by a broad range of luminaries across the ideological spectrum, from Dorothy Sayers, who dubbed the work 'A beneficent bomb' which jolted her faith alive when she first read it at age 15; to Slavoj Zizek, who sees GKC's Orthodoxy as the best articulation of the transgressive, revolutionary core of Christianity. Throughout the book, in his masterfully pithy style, Chesterton 'examines more exactly the general Christian theology which many execrated and few examined.' With his uncanny nose for paradox, Chesterton unearths the continually new and surprising treasures of tradition, the great 'Democracy of the Dead.' In one sense, *Orthodoxy* is Chesterton's spiritual autobiography, a tale of his seeking and questing for a real and living faith; ironically, in the midst of modernity's mandate of novelty, finding the genuine only in a return to tradition: 'It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.' [Sullivan 13; Ian Ker, *G.K. Chesterton: A Biography*; Joseph Pearce, *Literary Converts.*].

Chesterton's work of Christian apologetics, exploring the rationality of Christianity.