The Plague

First edition in English. Crown 8vo. Pp. 285, [3, blank]. Pale blue cloth lettered and ruled in red on a silver background to spine. Jacket design by Michael Ayrton (priced at 9s. 6d. net to front flap). With the statement 'This translation first published in 1948' to the copyright page indicating a first printing. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert. Precedes the U.S. edition published by Knopf. Originally published as La Peste by Gallimard, Paris, in 1947.

Top edge dust-soiled, scattered foxing to fore- and bottom edges, with some trivial soiling to dustwrapper's rear panel, which sustains a short closed tear to flap fold, else Fine. Presentable copies in a complete jacket, as is the case here, are quiet uncommon due to the poor paper stock used.

"On the morning of April 16, Dr Bernard Rieux emerged from his consulting-room and came across a dead rat in the middle of the landing." Allegoric tale of the Algerian coastal town of Oran in the grip of the bubonic plague, as seen through the eyes of Dr. Rieux. Set in the 1940's but loosely based on the 1849 cholera epidemic, shortly after French colonisation, which killed a large proportion of the town's population.

In gestation as early as April 1941, at the time of the Europe-wide Nazi pestilence, as evidenced by Camus's published diary entries on "the redeeming plague". [Carnets I, Mai 1935 – février 1942, Paris, Gallimard, 2013, see p.204]. A worldwide bestseller during the Covid-19 pandemic, its prescient fictional cordon sanitaire of Oran prefigured recent cascading national lockdowns.

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, largely on account of this novel. Basis for the 1992 film directed by Luis Puenzo, starring William Hurt, Sandrine Bonnaire, Robert Duvall and Raul Julia. "A matchless fable of fear, courage and cowardice." –The Independent

[Cyril Connolly, The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books from England, France and America, 1880–1950, London: Andre Deutsch; Hamish Hamilton, 1965]