BOISGILBERT, Edmund (pseud. of Ignatius Donnelly)

Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century

Chicago: Francis J. Schulte, [1890]. First Edition. First Printing. Octavo (19cm); publisher's blue cloth, with titles in gilt on spine and front cover; 367pp. Slight wear to cloth at spine ends, subtle darkening to spine, with gilt a trifle dull; still a very well-preserved Very Good or better copy, extremely uncommon thus. With the ownership stamp of W.W. Mayo (founder of the Mayo Clinic) and later stamp of Mayo's daughter Gertrude E. Berkman.

Scarce first printing of this future dystopian fantasy, noted by Rideout as an important (if negative) precursor to the radical socialist novels of the early 20th century. Donnelly, in his time world-famous as a politician, reformer, Atlantean and "Prince of Cranks," was an outspoken critic of Gilded Age capitalism, most famously in the current work, in which he predicts a cataclysmic revolt by the working class against their plutocratic oppressors; the "Caesar's Column" of the title refers to a pillar, constructed by the revolution's leader, built from the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of the war's victims. Written a year following Edward Bellamy's enormously popular Looking Backward, the book (again quoting Rideout), "...is almost exactly that book's opposite...Bellamy predicts the development in about one hundred years of a benevolent and beautiful society...[whereas] Donnelly...predicts the very probable development in about the same number of years of a vastly more appalling civilization...Unless the tendencies exhibited by world capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century are checked, Donnelly argues, they will inevitably produce a situation where wealth and power in America and abroad are concentrated in the hands of the few." Though Caesar's Column was never the best-seller that Looking Backward was, it did find a wide readership and was reprinted many times through the first decades of the 20th century. The first printing however was small, and copies suitable for the collector are notoriously elusive. This is a quite lovely copy, in the original binding, with far less than the expected wear. BAL 4816. SARGENT p.41. RIDEOUT p.10ff.

Price: $2,250.00

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