Anarchy in a Library: A Fable for Socialists.

Chicago: Black Cat Press 1935. First separate edition. 20 pp. Fine in original red boards stamped in gilt. Precedes the edition of 500 copies published by Zonne & Co. in Chicago in 1936. One of only 100 copies printed, all “for private distribution,” by Norman W. Forgue, Sr., and with a splendid hand-colored frontispiece by Calvin Brazelton. This Aesopic fable with a twist, which first appeared in the author’s PROSE FANCIES (London, 1894), is a kind of ANIMAL FARM — but not nearly as long, and based on the French Revolution not the Russian. Moreover, books (and even bookworms, but not barnyard animals) are the protagonists: talking among themselves, raising the standard of revolutionary equality, taking over the library from its human owner. Their revolution soon finds its Robespierre, however, and the short-lived community of octavos and folios descends into Terror, followed by Reaction.