Red Pilot; Memoirs of A Soviet Airman
- London: The Right Book Club, 1940
London: The Right Book Club, 1940. First U.K. Edition. Octavo. 22cm. Publisher's dark blue cloth titled in gilt to spine. Dustjacket. 260pp. Light scuffing to corners of the cloth, with some mild bumping to spine ends, a little wear to the cheap spine gilt; internally clean, uniformly toned throughout due to wartime economy standard paper quality; in a bright, complete dustjacket creasing to extremities, a number of closed tears, soiling, and shallow loss to the spine ends. A good copy in dustjacket with cosmetic wear.
A relatively scarce Right Book Club edition of Unishevsky's anti-communist military memoir. The Right Book Club was at this point helmed by Christina Foyle, of Foyle's book empire on the Charing Cross Road, with a board of directors, sponsors and advisors that seems to have spanned every Right Honourable and retired Lieutenant Colonal in the UK, and boasted over 20,000 members. The main purpose of the RBC was to 'combat' the influence of the Left Book Club created and helmed by Victor Gollancz and which produced printings of works by people like George Orwell to great success in its attempts to highlight the importance of accessible literature to the working poor.
Both organisations chugged along with varying degrees of success plagued as always by very British eccentricity, unsurprising considering that two of the most polarizing and unpopular members of the UK book trade were doing the steering. A rival organisation, pitched by its founder Arthur Bryant as a 'less radical' option and called the National Book Association, foundered swiftly after its decision to publish a sanitized edition of "Mein Kampf" met with what British understatement would describe as "displeasure
A relatively scarce Right Book Club edition of Unishevsky's anti-communist military memoir. The Right Book Club was at this point helmed by Christina Foyle, of Foyle's book empire on the Charing Cross Road, with a board of directors, sponsors and advisors that seems to have spanned every Right Honourable and retired Lieutenant Colonal in the UK, and boasted over 20,000 members. The main purpose of the RBC was to 'combat' the influence of the Left Book Club created and helmed by Victor Gollancz and which produced printings of works by people like George Orwell to great success in its attempts to highlight the importance of accessible literature to the working poor.
Both organisations chugged along with varying degrees of success plagued as always by very British eccentricity, unsurprising considering that two of the most polarizing and unpopular members of the UK book trade were doing the steering. A rival organisation, pitched by its founder Arthur Bryant as a 'less radical' option and called the National Book Association, foundered swiftly after its decision to publish a sanitized edition of "Mein Kampf" met with what British understatement would describe as "displeasure