Books

An attractive copy bound in finely woven greenish-gray cloth and stamped brightly in black on the spine. With a "Boots Booklover's Library" green shield sticker at the bottom of the front boards. Faint image of dampstain along the spine and a little leeeching of color to the top of the right corner of the rear panel. Name and date in ink on the front paste-down and the front endpaper. Front hinge expertly re-glued. With the sheet for conditions of the library mostly missing from the rear paste-down, leaving onlhy a few sentences printed in red headed by "Conditions". A charming and scarce little volume, measuring 7.5" x 5.25". Very Scarce: Only 3,000 copies printed of which 2,500 were bound and only 2,256 were actually sold! eep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results.Orwell wrote the book in 1934 and 1935 while he was living at various locations near Hampstead in London, and drew on his experiences in these and the preceding few years. At the beginning of 1928 he lived in lodgings in Portobello Road from where he started his tramping expeditions, sleeping rough and roaming the poorer parts of London.[1] At this time he wrote a fragment of a play in which the protagonist Stone needs money for a life-saving operation for his child. Stone would prefer to prostitute his wife rather than prostitute his artistic integrity by writing advertising copy.[2]Orwell's early writings appeared in The Adelphi, a left-wing literary journal edited by Sir Richard Rees, a wealthy and idealistic baronet who made Orwell one of his prot�g�s.[3] The character of Ravelston, the wealthy publisher in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, has a lot in common with Rees. Ravelston is acutely self-conscious about his upper-class status and defensive about his unearned income. Comstock speculates that Ravelston receives nearly two thousand pounds a year after tax a very comfortable sum in those days and Rees, in a volume of autobiography published in 1963, wrote: "I have never had the spending of much less than �1,000 a year of unearned income, and sometimes considerably more. . Before the war, this was wealth, especially for an unmarried man. Many of my socialist and intellectual friends were paupers compared to me ."[4] In quoting this, Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden comments that "One of these 'paupers' at least in 1935 was Orwell, who was lucky if he made �200 that year. . He appreciated Rees's editorial support at the Adelphi and sincerely enjoyed having him as a friend, but he could not have avoided feeling some degree of resentment toward a man who had no real job but who enjoyed an income four or five times greater than his." (Wikipedia) First Edition: Title page date of 1936. Printed in Great Britain by the Camelot Press, London and Southampton (on the copyright page).

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell. It is set in 1930s London and follows the life of Gordon Comstock, a bookseller who gives up his job to pursue a career as a writer, only to discover the financial and social challenges that decision brings.