With The Night Mail; A Story of 2000AD. Together with the extracts from the contemporary magazine in which it appeared
New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909. First American Edition. Octavo. 19.5cm. Publisher's deep blue cloth lavishly decorated in gilt and silver to spine and front board. 77pp. printed rectos only; 16pp. fictional advertisments to rear. Bright and straight, with some light scuffing to spine ends and extremities, a little darkened to the spine; internally clean and fresh, color pictorial endpapers by Leyendecker, color frontispiece with tissue guard, color plates. A very good copy of a pretty book.
A most unusual bit of Kipling in the shape of a fantastic vision of the future in which the majority of air travel is via dirigible (public, industrial, or private), and which takes the form of a journalistic account of the aerial mail service for some future magazine or other (a little optimistic of Kipling to assume we would have journalism in the 21st century). This heady and dramatic vision of the year 2000 is embellished with a selection of advertisments and blurbs for private airships, dirigible engineering, equipment, and classified ads looking for pilots ("Must be a member of the Church of England."), in a pseudo-documentary, transmedial fashion. The end result is an entertaining and deeply unserious bit of speculative fiction.
Price: $200.00