Ray Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451: The 50th Anniversary Edition" Signed Limited Edition No. 63 of 150, Leather Bound, Slipcased [Very Fine]

Personally signed by Ray Bradbury and Ralph Steadman

Graham Press 2005. Ray Bradbury "FAHRENHEIT 451: 50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION." Deluxe SIGNED Limited Edition. Signed by Ray Bradbury & Ralph Steadman directly onto the limitation page. This is number 63 of 451 numbered copies.

The entire printing of 503 copies for this edition consists of the following three variant bindings:

• 52 doubled lettered
• Number 1 through 150, Signed Limited Deluxe Edition in quarter leather binding.
• 301 numbered consecutively.

This is number 63 of 150 bound in quarter leather goatskin & marbled boards. Hardcover book in dust-jacket and enclosed in a red cloth slipcase. This is the definitive edition, featuring a new introduction by the author.

Bradbury has written a new introduction for this special limited edition.





In 2003, illustrator Ralph Steadman turned his talent to one of the most important books ever written and illustrated a gorgeous 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury's celebrated dystopian novel, titled after "the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns" and originally published when Bradbury was only thirty-three.

Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.

In his magnificent 2013 monograph, Proud Too Be Weirrd, Ralph Steadman admits to having grown jaded with illustrating other people's prose -- 'not much more than shameless self-indulgence" -- but writes of having gladly completed the Bradbury project due to its "vitally important theme -- the burning of all books." He reflects on the significance of Bradbury's masterwork: "As someone once said, I think it was me: There is nothing so dangerous as an idea. Particularly one whose time has come."

Reviews

"Frightening in its implications...Mr. Bradbury's account of this insane world, which bears many alarming resemblances to our own, is fascinating." -- The New York Times

"Hailed for its bracing portrait of a future media-addled society victimized by the systematic burning of all books, Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 is the perfect work to highlight issues of censorship and the freedom to read." -- Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Bradbury is credited with writing 27 novels and over 600 short stories. More than eight million copies of his works, published in over 36 languages, have been sold around the world.

Predominantly known for writing the iconic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in fantasy fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992).

Bradbury also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream." The Los Angeles Times credited Bradbury with the ability "to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity." Bradbury's grandson, Danny Karapetian, said Bradbury's works had "influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it's always really touching and comforting to hear their stories". The Washington Post noted several modern day technologies that Bradbury had envisioned much earlier in his writing, such as the idea of banking ATMs and earbuds and Bluetooth headsets from Fahrenheit 451, and the concepts of artificial intelligence within I Sing the Body Electric.