Ten Days That Shook The World

New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919. First Edition. First Printing. Octavo (21cm); green cloth lettered in orange on spine and front panel; pictorial endpapers; xxiv,371pp, with portrait frontispiece of Lenin and 15 plates of illustrations. Hint of sunning to spine, spine ends gently nudged, evidence of a bookplate removed from verso of front endpaper, with thin, partial cracks to hinges; still Very Good and sound, lacking the rare dustjacket. Reed's classic eyewitness account of the first ten days of the Bolshevik-led October Revolution in 1917. Reed joined the staff of the prominent Socialist magazine The Masses in 1913, the same year his first book was published, and married his wife, journalist Louise Bryant, in 1916. "On the Masses, Reed's modus operandi, as a reporter, was to get arrested, which he regularly did, while looking for trouble. Soon, weary of provoking the US authorities, he broadened his horizons to take in the ferment in the old world as well as the new. In 1917, appalled by Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war against Germany, the newlyweds set off for Europe, and wound up in St. Petersburg at the beginning of the revolution. Reed saw at once that this was his great opportunity. Where previously he had written and published poetry and flirted with the Mexican revolution, now his prose caught fire at the prospect of a worldwide socialist catharsis" (McCrum, Robert. "The 100 best nonfiction books: No.47 - Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed (1919). The Guardian, 19 December, 2016). Upon his return to the United States, according to his editor Max Eastman, Reed shut himself away, and wrote his account of the revolution in ten days. A landmark of 20th-century journalism. 83598. (Inventory #: 83598)