ATWOOD, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1986. 8vo. First American edition, first printing. Publisher’s quarter blue cloth over slate grey boards, in the instantly recognisable dust jacket by Fred Marcellino. An about very good copy, the cloth a little stained at the spine tips, very gently bumped at corners and board edges, the binding tight and gently rolled. Grey endpapers clean, the textblock top edge spotted, small stain to fore-edge, the contents otherwise fine. The dust jacket price-clipped at upper corner of front flap, complete, one abrasion to the spine panel, other edges very gently crimped, with some light stains to the spine panel and, much less so, elsewhere. A handsome copy overall.
A decent example of the first US printing of Atwood’s major work, the much-acclaimed dystopian speculative fiction which cemented Atwood’s position in Canadian literature and spawned a litany of literary analysis into feminism, race, and culture, to such extent an ‘unburnable’ copy was later produced and auctioned off. Published one year after the Canadian first printing, this US edition uses the same design as the simultaneously-published British Cape edition, making the design slightly more recognisable.
ATWOOD, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1986. 8vo. First American edition, first printing. Publisher’s quarter blue cloth over slate grey boards, in the instantly recognisable dust jacket by Fred Marcellino. An about very good copy, the cloth a little stained at the spine tips, very gently bumped at corners and board edges, the binding tight and gently rolled. Grey endpapers clean, the textblock top edge spotted, small stain to fore-edge, the contents otherwise fine. The dust jacket price-clipped at upper corner of front flap, complete, one abrasion to the spine panel, other edges very gently crimped, with some light stains to the spine panel and, much less so, elsewhere. A handsome copy overall.
A decent example of the first US printing of Atwood’s major work, the much-acclaimed dystopian speculative fiction which cemented Atwood’s position in Canadian literature and spawned a litany of literary analysis into feminism, race, and culture, to such extent an ‘unburnable’ copy was later produced and auctioned off. Published one year after the Canadian first printing, this US edition uses the same design as the simultaneously-published British Cape edition, making the design slightly more recognisable.
