Signed
Bandersnatch
Signed first edition, 1950
Bandersnatch is a forgotten British dystopian novel in which a journalist from a future London is transported far ahead in time to a remote Pacific island, the only surviving civilization after nuclear catastrophe has destroyed the rest of the world. The island is governed by a scientific elite and populated largely by assembly-line workers, the "Thalamic men," engineered to be free of desire and anxiety. Published by Grey Walls Press.
Rare signed copy. Signed by Ryves on the front free-endpaper: "with kind regards / T. E. Ryves 1951." An uncommon title, especially signed.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, bound in pale green cloth, ruled and lettered in red on spine. London: Grey Walls Press, 1950. #11145.
Page edges are foxed, else a very good copy in very good dust jacket with foxing and slight darkening of spine.
Rare signed copy. Signed by Ryves on the front free-endpaper: "with kind regards / T. E. Ryves 1951." An uncommon title, especially signed.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, bound in pale green cloth, ruled and lettered in red on spine. London: Grey Walls Press, 1950. #11145.
Page edges are foxed, else a very good copy in very good dust jacket with foxing and slight darkening of spine.
Additional Details
Bandersnatch is an obscure 1950 dystopian novel by T. E. Ryves, set on a remote Pacific island ruled by a scientific elite. The narrator, a journalist from mid twenty-first-century London, travels to the island on assignment to report on its advanced society. Upon arrival he is detained and informed that he has in fact been transported thousands of years into the future, long after the rest of the world has destroyed itself in a nuclear cataclysm.
The island is organized into three rigid castes: Instigators, the ruling scientific class; Influencers, intermediaries who relay directives; and Operatives, the mass-produced workers known as Thalamic men. Created on assembly lines and conditioned to feel neither anxiety nor desire, these near-automaton beings maintain what the islanders call the "smooth running of the machine," forming a kind of collective human organism designed to function without conflict or aspiration.
Held under guard as a rare specimen of the pre-cataclysmic world, the protagonist gradually learns the history of this enclosed society. Early attempts at building an isolated utopia failed when idleness and demoralization led to anarchy. In response, the scientific class assumed total control, engineering a social system intended to eliminate the conditions that once produced despair and, in their view, had brought about global annihilation. The result is a community in which individuality and emotional life have been almost entirely extinguished.
The novel's title refers to the "Bandersnatch" from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, described there as "frumious," a portmanteau of fuming and furious invented by Carroll.
Thomas Evan Ryves, born in 1895, served in the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War and trained in medicine. Aside from a handful of poems, Bandersnatch appears to be his only known work of fiction.
The island is organized into three rigid castes: Instigators, the ruling scientific class; Influencers, intermediaries who relay directives; and Operatives, the mass-produced workers known as Thalamic men. Created on assembly lines and conditioned to feel neither anxiety nor desire, these near-automaton beings maintain what the islanders call the "smooth running of the machine," forming a kind of collective human organism designed to function without conflict or aspiration.
Held under guard as a rare specimen of the pre-cataclysmic world, the protagonist gradually learns the history of this enclosed society. Early attempts at building an isolated utopia failed when idleness and demoralization led to anarchy. In response, the scientific class assumed total control, engineering a social system intended to eliminate the conditions that once produced despair and, in their view, had brought about global annihilation. The result is a community in which individuality and emotional life have been almost entirely extinguished.
The novel's title refers to the "Bandersnatch" from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, described there as "frumious," a portmanteau of fuming and furious invented by Carroll.
Thomas Evan Ryves, born in 1895, served in the Royal Field Artillery during the First World War and trained in medicine. Aside from a handful of poems, Bandersnatch appears to be his only known work of fiction.