WE ... Translated by Mirra Ginsburg

New York: The Viking Press, [1972]. First Edition (& 1st printing). Octavo, original blue boards with blue cloth spine lettered in silver and orange, top edge stained light blue. The first printing of this translation. Ink name on front free endpaper, small mark to upper page edges, a very good clean copy in the original colour pictorial dust jacket, which has minor creasing to the front & rear flaps, a 1-inch closed tear to top edge of rear panel at the spine hinge, a small scuff on the spine with a small internal tape mend, and light rudding overall. The dust jacket price corner ($6.95) on the front flap is unclipped. A very scarce edition of this classic.


WE (Russian: ??, romanized: My) is a dystopian novel written in 1920–1921. It was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York, with the original Russian text first published in 1952. WE is generally considered to be the grandfather of the futuristic dystopia genre. It takes modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens' lives should be controlled with mathematical precision. It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre. George Orwell said that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, although Huxley denied this. Orwell's own Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was also inspired by We. A major science fiction novel.