ROMAINS, Jules. Men of Good Will #8: Verdun, comprising The Prelude and The Battle. Trans. from the French by Warre B. Wells. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1939. 8vo. First American edition. Publisher’s attractive blue cloth lettered and decorated in gilt and black, in the striking dust jacket designed by Arthur Hawkins Jr. A near fine example, the cloth clean and bright, gently bumped to the corners and tips, topstain bright, the contents fine throughout, light stains to endpapers and to folding map. The dust jacket price-clipped with new price of $2.50 net stamped here, else fine. A fabulous example overall.
The eighth US volume in the author’s epic twenty-eight book sequence capturing in absolute maximalism the interwar period across Europe. At 2.1 million words, it is one of the longest novels ever written. While the original French titles were published in single volumes, the British and US editions were published in dual volumes; this first volume contains books fifteen and sixteen, ‘The Prelude’ and ‘The Battle’. The cycle in its totality is the primary text in the literary theory of unanimism, the philosophy developed by Romains himself which configures the shared experience—of groups, communities, nations and epochs—as the prevailing consciousness rather than a single experience—hence its maximalist narrative, skipping from one person to the next instead of a central protagonist. Romains was a perennial flirt with the Nobel Prize for Literature—sixteen nominations, no wins. Uncommon in such exquisite condition.
ROMAINS, Jules. Men of Good Will #8: Verdun, comprising The Prelude and The Battle. Trans. from the French by Warre B. Wells. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1939. 8vo. First American edition. Publisher’s attractive blue cloth lettered and decorated in gilt and black, in the striking dust jacket designed by Arthur Hawkins Jr. A near fine example, the cloth clean and bright, gently bumped to the corners and tips, topstain bright, the contents fine throughout, light stains to endpapers and to folding map. The dust jacket price-clipped with new price of $2.50 net stamped here, else fine. A fabulous example overall.
The eighth US volume in the author’s epic twenty-eight book sequence capturing in absolute maximalism the interwar period across Europe. At 2.1 million words, it is one of the longest novels ever written. While the original French titles were published in single volumes, the British and US editions were published in dual volumes; this first volume contains books fifteen and sixteen, ‘The Prelude’ and ‘The Battle’. The cycle in its totality is the primary text in the literary theory of unanimism, the philosophy developed by Romains himself which configures the shared experience—of groups, communities, nations and epochs—as the prevailing consciousness rather than a single experience—hence its maximalist narrative, skipping from one person to the next instead of a central protagonist. Romains was a perennial flirt with the Nobel Prize for Literature—sixteen nominations, no wins. Uncommon in such exquisite condition.
