The Good Citizen’s Alphabet.

RUSSELL, Bertrand.

$1,250.00

Item Number: 138589

London: Gaberbocchus Press Limited, 1953.

First edition of this playful work by the Nobel Prize-winning author. Octavo, original cloth, with drawings by Franciszka Themerson. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “Rhoda Kellogg from Bertrand Russell.” The recipient, Rhoda Kellogg was a notable scholar of early childhood and maintained an extensive collection of children’s artwork. She also had carried on an extra-marital affair with Russell. From Michael D. Stevenson’s “In Solitude I Brood on War”: Bertrand Russell’s 1939 American Lecture Tour”, “Although Russell claimed he possessed no ‘errant philandering impulses’ (Let. 3) and seemed to avoid the sexual entanglements that marked his earlier American tours, he nonetheless met several women with whom he had been sexually intimate including Rhoda Kellogg and Miriam Brudno.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket.

A is for Asinine, Z is for Zeal in this alphabet written, with no purpose beyond fun, by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. It was originally given to his friends Stefan and Franciszka Themerson as a Christmas present in 1952 and only later published with drawings by Franciszka. Russells playful satire on 26 political and rhetorical words is reprinted here, along with his six-line History of the World in Epitome (for use in Martian infant schools) - a title almost as long as the text.