Brave New World, the personal copy of Sir Alfred Duff Cooper, future 1st Viscount Norwich, an important figure in the British Government's anti-appeasement faction during Hitler's rise in the 1930s Aldous Huxley Other Non-Fiction

This first edition, first printing features compelling provenance. The sole previous ownership mark is the illustrated bookplate of Duff Cooper a man with a front row seat to real, non-literary dystopia in the 1930s affixed to the front pastedown.Condition approaches very good. The blue cloth binding remains clean and tight with bright spine gilt and sharp corners, though with some superficial scuffs and spine wrinkling, particularly at the spine ends. The contents are notably clean, with no spotting, no soiling, no additional previous ownership marks, and only mild age-toning. The binding is protected beneath a clear, removable mylar cover.One can imagine reading a book this very book about a dystopian utopia while across the English Channel Hitler s Reich, with its racially homogenous "Volksgemeinschaft" aspirations was ascending, seemingly unopposed. Less than a decade later, Hitler s armies would invade the low countries and France, the Wehrmacht s legions equipped with millions of Pervitin pills a belligerent equivalent of Soma allowing soldiers to stay awake for days at a time and march many more miles without rest.Cooper certainly saw it coming. The year after Brave New World was publsihed, On 8 September 1933, Cooper wrote to his longtime friend and anti-appeasement ally Winston S. Churchill from Austria after transiting through Germany to report "They are preparing for war with more general enthusiasm than a whole nation has ever before put into such preparation" and to express his concern that the British government was "discussing disarmament "It was this real brave new world that Sir Alfred Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) played a critical role in opposing. In October 1938, half a decade after this volume was published, Cooper was serving as Britain s First Lord of the Admiralty the position his friend Winston S. Churchill had held from 1911-1915 and would hold again from late-1939 to mid-1940. Cooper was incensed by his Government s craven attempts to appease and accommodate Hitler s Germany. Cooper resigned in protest. Cooper s wife, Lady Diana, telephoned Churchill to tell him the news and later recalled in her memoirs how, as she spoke, "his voice was broken with emotion. I could hear him cry."Duff Cooper was educated at Eton and Oxford, served with the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, and was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1924. He served as: Secretary for War (1935-37); First Lord of the Admiralty (1937-38); Minister of Information (1940-41); and Ambassador to France (1944-47). Cooper was married to Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and a successful actress; it is her name and image that is found at the upper center of his bookplate in this volume. Cooper was knighted in 1948 and created Viscount in 1952.