The Science of Life, Volumes 1 and 2

New York: Doubleday Doran, 1931. First American edition, inscribed on the half title. x, 773, ix, [2], [774]–1514pp. 2 vols. 8vo. Blue cloth, decoratively blind stamped on front board, in gilt on spine. Spine sunned, corners bumped, with moderate shelf wear. Printed endpapers, illustrated throughout with black-and-white line drawings. First American edition, inscribed on the half title. x, 773, ix, [2], [774]–1514pp. 2 vols. 8vo. The Doubleday two-volume set of Wells' scientific collaboration with his son, the zoologist George Philip (G. P.) Wells, and Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and brother of author Aldous Huxley. (Wells had also studied (truncated) biology under Huxley's father.) Originally published as 31 semi-monthly installments, it was first collected into book form in 1931 as both a single volume edition by Cassell and in these two volumes by Doubleday.

H. G. Wells was inspired to create the series by the success of his humanities version, The Outline of History, ten years prior. This work conducted an equally thorough overview of the known biological science of the time, and is particularly notable not only for credentials of the authors, but also its robust defense of Darwin's evolutionary theory ("Book Three: The Incontrovertible Fact of Evolution").

While on this project Wells served mainly in an editorial capacity, leaving the main writing to his son and Huxley, each actual experts in the field, the authorship credit was nonetheless granted to all three, with H. G.'s name the most prominent on the title page.

The first volume is doubly inscribed: initially on the half-title page by H. G. Wells to his son with fellow author Rebecca West, Anthony Panther West ("A. P. W. / with love / fr. H. G. W."), and then on the first free endpaper to Anthony's son, "For Edmund / with fondest love / Xmas 1995," most likely by his mother, the painter Katherine "Kitty" Duff Church West.

Anthony Panther West Fairfield (1914–1987), a critically acclaimed author in his own right, was born one year after his famous parents commenced their long affair. His unusual middle name references Wells' pet name for Rebecca (his own was "Jaguar"), and "Fairfield" was his mother's original family name (her adopted pseudonym "Rebecca West" was from an Ibsen play). Writing under the name Anthony West, he composed many pieces for the New Yorker over the course of twenty years, and wrote a biography of Wells (H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life), but is perhaps best known for his 1955 roman à clef novel, Heritage, in which he excoriated the mother figure, a very thinly disguised West, while being much more sympathetic to the father. West was so upset by the portrayal that she broke off relations with Anthony, and managed to prevent the book's publication in Great Britain during her lifetime.

Though Wells never married West, he clearly maintained a positive presence in his son's life, as evidenced both by this warm inscription and Anthony's later profile of him, which a critic stated was "a book whose main purpose seems to be to even the score with anyone who has ever denigrated Mr. West's father (Inventory #: 371818)