Jun 21, 2016 - Sale 2420

Sale 2420 - Lot 261

Price Realized: $ 188
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 400
(RADICALISM.) Rollins, William, Jr. The Shadow Before. 471 pages. 8vo, publisher's cloth, faintly dampstained on top board, minimal wear; contents clean except for minimal dampstaining on first three leaves; in moderately worn pictorial dust jacket; early owner's inscription on front free endpaper. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the U.S.S.R., 1935
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Additional Details

First Moscow edition in English of an American leftist novel, reissued for distribution as propaganda in the West. It tells the story of a textile union strike, and draws upon the author's experiences as a Massachusetts textile worker, as well as accounts of the famous 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, NC. 8 copies in OCLC, and none known at auction.
The book bears the 1940 signature of Junius Irving Scales (1920-2002). Scales was a North Carolinian who joined the Communist Party in 1939 and became an active organizer. He was arrested in 1954 under the Smith Act for membership in an organization which advocated violence, and became the only American to serve a prison term solely for his party membership. He left the party in 1957.