Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen:

£6,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

First and only edition of Koestler's first published book 'From White Nights and Red Days'. Koestler was embedded as a journalist in the 1931 Zeppelin Arctic expedition. He then travelled around Russia and what was then Soviet Central Asia. Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen was intended for global publication by the Comintern, and several of the illustrations (after photographs) are propagandist in nature: 'Collective farmers go to their field work in an organised manner', shortly before the Soviet famine of 1932-3. Koesler would recall, however, that 'in spite of my numerous contracts... only one edition of Red Days did, in fact, appear. This was the Kharkiv edition in German, intended for the German-speaking national minorities in the Ukraine. It is a thin, paperbound volume, so thoroughly expurgated that less than half of the original manuscript was allowed to stand' (his autobiography The Invisible Writing, 1954, pp.149, 153). Rare: WorldCat records only four copies (Edinburgh, BL, Frankfurt and Leipzig). One of the very few absolutely verifiable copies of the rare first work by Arthur Koestler, unknown to many bibliographers and literary encyclopedias (for example, not in Kosch, Killy, the exile bibliographies and the monograph by P.A. Huber). Only three copies are recorded in public libraries (in London, Leipzig and Frankfurt), and the book has not been traced at all for the last 60 years. As a reference to literature, see for more details Chr. Buckard, Arthur Koestle

• Binding: Hardcover

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