Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works

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Earth Stopped: or Mr. Marx's Sporting Tour: Available Copies

Good 1st edition (2nd impression) without dust jacket. Grubby cover and badly faded and stained spine. Bumped to top and bottom of spine.Front spine edge worn. Page edges foxed. Binding remains tight and pages very good. See photos

Publication: London, Collins, 1934 Formatting: 8vo, pp. 252. Condition Report: Good. The red cloth boards remain reasonably firm but show signs of typical handling, with general rubbing to the extremities, minor edge wear, and slight bumping to the corners. The spine is heavily sunned, having darkened to a uniform brown, though the black text remains fully legible. The text block edges are untrimmed and show noticeable toning alongside scattered foxing. Internally, the binding remains secure, with moderate foxing primarily affecting the endpapers and preliminary leaves. A contemporary ink gift inscription, reading "And I hope that you will laugh as much as I did" and dated 'Xmas 1934', occupies the front free endpaper. The remaining text pages are clean and largely free of blemish. Catalogue Note: This is a first edition, first printing of T. H. White's early dystopian satire, published four years before the debut of his celebrated Arthurian saga, The Sword in the Stone. Bound in the publisher's original cloth without the dust jacket, the volume bears an early provenance marker in the form of a contemporary ink gift inscription dated to the Christmas season of its publication year. Early standalone titles by White, particularly in their first iteration, are increasingly scarce on the open market, marking this as an intriguing acquisition for collectors of pre-war speculative and comic fiction. Predating T. H. Whiteâs legendary Arthurian works, Earth Stopped or Mr. Marxâs Sporting Tour is a wildly inventive comic dystopia that blends pastoral satire with apocalyptic science fiction. When a Communist revolution triggers a devastating future war across Britain, a cast of fox-hunting country gentlemen must navigate the absolute collapse of traditional rural society. White perfectly channels the sharp, fast-paced humour of his contemporaries, creating a bizarre and prescient narrative that examines how deeply rooted social rituals survive, or fail, when the world as they know it abruptly ends.