Ray Bradbury "The Illustrated Man - The 45th Anniversary Edition" Signed Limited Edition, No. 283 of 600 Slipcased [Very Fine]

Personally signed by Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan, and Ed Gorman

Signed and numbered limited edition, No. 283 of only 250 signed copies. Glossy dust-jacket.

"You could hear the voices murmuring, small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body."

A peerless American storyteller, Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury -- eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin. In this phantasmagoric sideshow, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Provocative and powerful, Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth -- as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world. One of the essential classics of speculative fiction, from the author of The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, and The October Country.

This edition is one of the Gauntlet "Classics Revisited" series, in which the authors themselves play a major role in the dust jacket design. In addition to illustrating the dust jacket, Bradbury help crafted the overall look of the book and wrote the introduction. This special edition also has rare photo of a young Ray Bradbury on back cover. Three stories from this book were the basis for the major motion picture "The Illustrated Man" (1969) starring Rod Steiger.

Reviews

"Scientific fiction enclosed in a frame -- wanderer meets a tattooed man whose images foretell the future, leaving a space to preview the destiny of the viewer. Here is an open circuit on ideas, which range from religion, to racial questions, to the atom bomb, rocket travel (of course), literature, escape to the past, dreams and hypnotism, children and their selfish and impersonal acceptance of immediate concepts, robots, etc. Note that here the emphasis is on fiction instead of science, and that the stories -- in spite of space and futurities -- have some validity, even if the derivations can be traced. Sample The Veldt, or This Man, or Fire Balloons, or The Last Night In the World for the really special qualities. A book which is not limited by its special field." -- Kirkus Review

"Bradbury is an authentic original." -- Time

"Ray Bradbury has accomplished what very few artists do. With his visions of possible futures and edgy presents . . . he has changed us." -- The Boston Globe

"His stories and novels are part of the American language." -- The Washington Post

"Deftly plotted, beautifully written, characterized by protagonists who are intensely real...there is no writer quite like Ray Bradbury." -- The New York Times

"A master... Bradbury has a style all his own, much imitated but never matched." -- Portland Oregonian

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.