With the Night Mail
With the Night Mail
By Rudyard Kipling, science fiction from 1904 predicting aeronautics in 2000 by lighter-than-air craft, with an introduction by Thomas Pinney, and 32 two-color illustrations by Vincent Perez, signed, 1998. $285.00
Publication 54
ADD TO CARTRudyard Kipling (1865-1936) wrote this work of science fiction in 1904, a year after the Wright brothers' flight. He had been interested in aviation since 1887, when he published an essay on a successful flight by a French balloonist three years earlier. He predicted that the mere threat of air power would bring combatants to the peace table and end war forever.
Thomas Pinney, an authority on Kipling and a professor at Pomona College, wrote in the introduction, "The poet of the automobile who never drove one, the singer of the airplane who never left the ground, is one with the author of The Jungle Book, who never saw an Indian jungle, and who wrote the book in a Vermont winter, with four feet of snow outside. What better evidence could one have that the imagination does not need direct experience in order to function, but may work all the more powerfully without it?"
Like the first edition, which puffed up the book by printing text only on recto pages, with versos blank, the Arion edition fleshes out the book with thirty-two pages of illustrations by the artist Vincent Perez, who reinvents dirigibles, rubberized flight suits, engines, propellers, gondolas, and docking stations.
FORMAT
Octavo, 9 3/4" by 6 1/4", 122 pages. The types are English Old Style, handset and in Monotype composition by Mackenzie & Harris, with Cheltenham and Cushing Antique handset for display in the appendices. The frontispiece portrait of Kipling is a wood engraving from a photograph that appeared in "Century Magazine", reproduced from a photo-engraving. It is printed in sepia on coated stock and tipped in. The illustrations were printed by offset lithography. The paper is Legion Letterpress. The binding, done in-house, is machine-sewn, in full tan sailcloth emulating mailbags carried on the postal packet, with a cream paper label identifying the author on the spine and the title on the front cover. In lieu of a slipcase, it has a Tyvek mailing envelope with a string-and-button tie, with an airmail label identifying the title and author at front center and a "millennial commemorative" stamp at top right. Edition 250 numbered copies, plus 26 lettered copies hors de commerce, signed by the artist.
POSTAGE: Additional postage may apply; please inquire for details.
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