first edition
1939
by Chadwick, George
THE DEATH GUARD, Hutchinson, 1939, 1st ed. (3rd Thousand), some old modest moisture staining to sections of the cloth covers, else a tight vg copy in just about vg full color pictorial dust-wrapper with 2 small chips and some dust-soiling, mostly to the rear dust-wrapper panel along with some inner clear tape reinforcement to the upper and lower margins. Rare in any dw, this being one of only four copies I have seen in nearly 50 years so properly adorned. ( Although the author is virtually unknown to the wider public, his work has received attention from literary scholars. The novel contains many themes later developed by L Ron Hubbard and James Blish. Chadwick was a political thinker with socialist tendencies, a Fabian and subsequently an Independent and a disciple of H.G. Wells. Legend has it that Wells used to refer to this book as one of the greatest he had ever read. It was written shortly after World War I, but by the time it was picked up for publication, World War II was already underway and allegedly, Chadwick had been killed in combat, though the 1992 paperback states that he died in 1955. To complicate matters even further, the printing house that was handling the first run of the novel was bombed in an air raid, and almost all copies were destroyed. Consequently, most science fiction fans wrote off The Death Guard as pure myth, a figment of Wells's prodigious imagination and for years it was considered a lost novel. In 1992 it was republished, with an introduction by Brian Aldiss. The Death Guard was cited in Karl Edward Wagner's "The Thirteen Best Science Fiction Horror Novels" [5] and Ramsey Campbell's "Thirteen Novels on the Edge of Horror"........Wikipedia)
(Inventory #: 16697)
(248) 420-7830
