Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
The first edition of Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, published by Secker & Warburg in 1938. The designer is unknown (small initial K in the bottom left corner of the cover). The book jacket uses Motor, the spine uses the undecorated variant of the same face, called Dynamo. The imperfections in the type on the cover could be because it was possibly redrawn for the mechanical.
“Despite a modest print run of 1500 copies, “Homage to Catalonia ran so counter to prevailing opinion that in its first 12 years, it sold only 600 copies; yet it was perhaps the most rigorously clear view of the Spanish reality in the English language” (New York Times).
Orwell Foundation describes the book this way:
Orwell went to Spain in late 1936, and enlisted to fight for the POUM, an anti-Stalinist communist party. While there, he was shot in the neck and forced to flee the country after the POUM were declared an illegal organisation. Orwell’s experiences in Spain turned him decisively against Soviet communism, and the book’s criticisms of the Communists proved controversial at home – his usual publisher, Gollancz, would not print the book, which appeared in 1938 from Secker & Warburg
