Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
New York: Knopf, 1964. First Edition. Hardcover. 1st edition of Willy Wonka, preceding the London edition. Fine in fine dustjacket, the colors unfaded and the whites as white as old school chalk, and most copies have a layer of dust on them that looks like they’ve been sprinkled with the ashes of a cremated gopher (in every ruined book there’s a fine book wondering what the hell happened?). Bibliographically, this book can be an icy road. Ours is in a 1st printing jacket with no ISBN number on the back, and it’s the 1st printing book too, with a 6 line (not a 5 line) colophon on the last page. fine / fine. Item #448
a copy with 5 lines is a reprint, and any description calling it a later issue, or later state is fraud dislodged from its natural home in the bibliographical wasteland of the 1920s. And such mishandling of terminology is either willful misdirection (what business analysts call moral hazard) or a palooza of not knowing what one is talking about, and this sort of abuse is so repeatedly utilized by rogue booksellers that it first numbs a buyer’s ability to recognize its preposterousness (like leaking electricity) and then dulls a buyer’s ability to remember that they ought to be insulted (malware for your brain). And speaking of the preposterous, this book is not scarce, even when its fine, and the most obvious lies, and therefore the most self–defeating for the liar (the incurable rash), are calling any book scarce when there are 10 copies of it for sale online, or calling it fine when an adjoining picture shows that it’s not. And when sellers with no code of ethics say, “The last thing I want to do is take advantage of you,” it just means they have other things to do first. Brown top edge, if that turns out to be meaningful. A flawless copy, as it should be, tighter than a hole and its patch, and cleaner than a baby’s conscience, and settling for less (copies that could only be sold to Mr. Magoo), when a 1st edition like ours is here to be had for such a small premium, exposes one’s discernment as resembling the diet of a goat, and such goat–like taste will inescapably cause disenchantment fatigue, and prove to be the harbinger of remorse. Can you buy a misdescribed or flawed one cheaper? You can. But in the same way that needing a large shopping cart to hold all your groceries at a 7–Eleven underwrites and promotes substandard food, every time you buy a second tier 1st edition, you cast a vote for the kind of book world you want (Book Code). The nearest star is 4.37 light years away. At 3 million miles per hour, getting there would be a voyage of 1,000 years and, with our current technology, the fuel required for such a journey would equal the mass of our Sun. It doesn’t matter. There’s no need to go anywhere. Earth is the only planet that has chocolate.
Price:
$4,750.00