Watership Down
London: Rex Collings, 1972.
First edition, first printing. viii, 413 pp., color folding map tipped in at rear. Near Fine with slight crease to spine, light rubbing to extremities, and shallow bump to upper edge of rear board. Two faint smudges to copyright pages, contents overall clean and bright. In a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket with trivial wear. A beautiful copy, the best we've seen.
Richard Adams had a hard time finding a publisher for his novel about a small band of rabbits searching for a new home after their warren is destroyed by developers. The one-man publisher Rex Collings finally agreed to print a run of 2,500 copies. “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception,” Collings told a friend “Do you think I’m mad?”
The book was an instant success and won the 1972 Carnegie Medal in Literature, as well as the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. Watership Down riveted its readers by bridging the child world and the adult world, using vividly naturalistic anthropomorphic animals to contrast honor, dignity and courage with moral and physical cowardice. It is a fluffy bunny book that begins with a quote from Agamemnon by Aeschylus:
Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?
The book has been taught in American schools for decades and has never been out of print.
The house reeks of death and dripping blood.
Price: $7,800