THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (First Albatross Library edition)

Descripción

First printing of the Albatross Modern Continental Library paperback edition - published as No. 29 in the series. The book was originally published in hardback in the USA by Albert & Charles Boni, and by Longmans Green & Co. in the UK, both in 1927. ***Very good in green printed card covers. Extremities of covers just slightly rubbed, mainly to the edges of the spine. Covers nice and clean. Corners only slightly rubbed. Light reading creases to the spine which is also slightly rolled from reading. Spine tight. Edges of page block quite clean without any foxing. Internally also very good with a neat contemporary ownership name and date in fountain-pen ink to the inside front cover. No other annotations. Pages clean with no foxing. No creases or tears. ***181mm x 111mm. 178 pages plus an eight-page publisher's catalogue at the back of the book. ***'Five people perished when the finest bridge in Peru broke on a summer's day in 1748. Why were they victims of this accident? Had these five, different in age, sex and outlook obtained complete fulfilment and so passed on? Discovering their biographies among the papers of an old monk, burnt for his attempt to solve the plan of life by unravelling these problems, the author leaves the question open. The bridge of love is the only link between the land of the living and the land of the dead.' (Quote taken from the inside front cover) ***A nice clean copy of the first paperback edition of this famous Pulitzer Prize-winning work. Books published under the Albatross Modern Continental Library imprint were intended to be sold and read in Continental Europe and, as such, are quite uncommon in the UK. The book is in remarkably good condition considering it is 90 years old - printed on nice quality paper. The Albatross Library editions were a direct inspiration for Allen Lane when he started the Penguin Library in 1935, including the colour coding of the covers depending on the contents. ***'Albatross Books was a German publishing house based in Hamburg that produced the first modern mass-market paperback books. Albatross was founded in 1932 by John Holroyd-Reece, Max Christian Wegner and Kurt Enoch. The name was chosen because albatross is the same word in many European languages. Based on the example of Tauchnitz, a Leipzig publishing firm that had been producing inexpensive and paper-bound English-language reprints for the continental market, Albatross set out to streamline and modernize the paperback format. The books in the series were produced with a layout designed by Giovanni Mardersteig, then art director at the Mondadori Italian publishing house, including a new standard size which approximated the aesthetically pleasing proportions known as the Golden Ratio. They used new sans-serif fonts developed by Stanley Morison among others, and were color-coded by genre, with green for travel, orange for fiction, and so on. The series was so successful that Albatross soon purchased Tauchnitz, giving itself an instant 100-year heritage. The outbreak of World War Two brought the Albatross experiment to a halt, but by then Allen Lane had adopted many of Albatross' ideas, including the standard size, the idea of covers using typography and logo but no illustrations, and the use of color coding by type of content, for Penguin Books. Lane later hired Kurt Enoch, co-founder of Albatross Books, to manage Penguin's American branch.' (Wiki) ***For all our books, postage is charged at cost, allowing for packaging: any shipping rates indicated on ABE are an average only: we will reduce the P & P charge where appropriate - please contact us for postal rates for heavier books and sets etc. N° de ref. del artículo PB458

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