Zodiak

New York/London: Harper & Brothers. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. [nice solid copy, light soiling to bottom edge, internally clean; jacket is edgeworn, small piece missing at bottom right-hand corner of front panel, faint dampstain near top of front panel, nearly split along rear foldover, still quite attractive]. Futurist fantasy in which a young Greek war refugee, introduced to the wonders of modern machinery, works his way up from garage mechanic to member of an airline crew. This gets him mixed up with a mysterious American arms merchant, and he eventually finds himself a stowaway on a gigantic Russian airship (the "Zodiak") operated by the Militant Anti-God League, which (of course!) takes its marching, er, flying orders straight from Moscow, and whose mission, he discovers, is to blanket the world with Communist propaganda leaflets and thereby lay the groundwork for a World Revolution. The book appears to be chock-full of mystical symbolism and stuff (check the signs of the Zodiac on the jacket spine), and in its closing pages the author quotes that well-known mystic Henry Ford: "Shall we not some day reach a point where the machine is becomes all powerful and the man of no consequence?" Shall we not, indeed? .