[UTOPIAN THOUGHT] GODIN, M. [Jean Baptiste André]; Marie Howland, trans.

Social Solutions

New York: John W. Lovell Company, [1886]. First American Edition. Octavo (18.75cm.); publisher's plum blind-ruled cloth, gilt-lettered spine; x,[3]-326,[2],28pp.; engraved portrait frontispiece, six folding plates, including plans, text illus. throughout. Cloth a bit rubbed at extremities, corners bumped, boards rather soiled, spine sunned, some toning to endpapers due to inferior paper quality, a couple plates slightly mis-folded with subsequent creasing, else Very Good, internally near fine.

Detailed treatise modernizing Fourier's Utopian phalanx, described here as a "social palace" (the still-extant Familistère in Guise, France), housing fellow workers, the surrounding grounds including a café, bakery, butcher, restaurant, school, and communal vegetable garden. The experiment would succceed for two decades and boasted, for at least part of 1864, the translator Marie Howland as one of its citizens. Howland was herself a committed member of the utopian and free love movements and sampled life in Unity House, Hammonton Vineland, the Topolobampo Colony, and the Fairhope Colony in Alabama (Richard C.S. Trahair, Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary (1999), p. 192). See also EGBERT II, p. 49.

Price: $350.00

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