LINDSAY, David.

£300 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

A Voyage to Arcturus. Second edition of Lindsay's first book, a surreal interplanetary fantasy. David Lindsay, a Scottish Calvinist, was a major influence on C. S. Lewis.Lewis spoke on A Voyage to Arcturus in his book Of Other Worlds. "He is the first writer to discover what 'other plants' are really good for in fiction. Not merely physical strangeness or merely spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which is what we are always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving 'other worlds' you must draw on the only real 'other world' we know, that of the spirit."The first edition (1920) flopped, selling only 596 of 1630 copies. "Someone or other must have picked up one of the remaindered copies in the middle thirties and talked" (publisher's note).

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