The Word Exchange: A Novel (signed)

New York: Doubleday, 2014. SIGNED by the AUTHOR directly on the title page (her signature only, NOT personalized to anyone). Fine condition in a bright and shiny Near Fine dust jacket. NOT price clipped ($26.95). The jacket is protected by a removable clear-plastic sleeve. Square and tight. Sharp corners. NO owner's name or bookplate. Pages are crisp, clean and unmarked. NO underlining. NO highlighting. NO margin notes. 2014. First Printing of the First Edition, with complete number row (13579 10 8642) on the copyright page. The author's debut novel. Bound in the original gray boards and orange spine, stamped in shiny silver. From the dust jacket: "In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted 'death of print' has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but have become so intuitive as to hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange. Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where they are hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail… to communicate -- or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving behind a written clue: ALICE. It's a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one of them ever fell into harm's way. And thus begins Anana's journey down the proverbial rabbit hole… Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana's search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways, the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library, secret meetings of the underground resistance, the Diachronic Society…" . SIGNED by the AUTHOR. First Printing of the First Edition. Hardcover. Fine condition/Near Fine dust jacket. Illus. by NOT a library discard. 8vo. (xii), 371pp. Great Packaging, Fast Shipping.