TECHNICS AND CIVILIZATION

First UK edition, first printing. Hardcover. Publisher's original navy cloth with gilt titles to the spine, without dustwrapper. With 15 black and white photographic plates throughout. A very good copy, the binding square and firm with some rubbing to the extremities, the cloth a little faded to the upper board and spine. The closed text block edge is toned, with a small dust mark to the bottom edge. The contents, with various small pencilled marginalia by the distinguished conservation architect Martin Stancliffe to the margins, are otherwise clean. Scarce in the first edition.

The first book in the author's four-volume 'Renewal of Life' series, followed by 'The Culture of Cities' (1938), 'The Condition of Man' (1944) and 'The Conduct of Life' (1951). "Written during a period of rapid social disintegration, of economic depression, spreading totalitarianism, and world war, the four volumes of the Renewal of Life series [...] record a profound change in Mumford's social outlook, a gathering pessimism, but not despair, about the possibilities of human renewal. The first two volumes, however, which were completed before the beginning of World War II, are expressions of Mumford's resolute social optimism [...] They are also the most original and stimulating works of the series. "To me," W. H. Auden wrote Mumford in 1938, "they are the two most interesting books of our time"" (Miller, Donald L.: Lewis Mumford: A Life, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989, p.302).