Physical description

Hard cover book. The Iron Heel
Author: Jack London
Publisher: Mills & Boon
Date: 1929
Further Information: A plain volume bound in pale blue cloth, with a stuck-on library classification label ("PAT FIC LON") on the spine and no visible date, edition statement, or printer's imprint on the pages shown the copyright/date page. There's no gilt decoration, no illustrated boards, and no dust jacket.

Publication type

fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on the spine with the typed text PAT FIC LON
Paste down front end paper has a sticker from Warrnambool Public Library covered by a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Front loose end paper has a stamp from Corangamite Regional Library Service
Flyleaf has a stamp from Warrnambool Mechanics Institute

Summary

The Iron Heel is a dystopian novel set in a future America where a rising socialist movement provokes a brutal oligarchic dictatorship. It is told through a manuscript found centuries later, in which Avis Everhard describes her husband Ernest’s failed struggle against the ‘Iron Heel’. Anthony Meredith, a scholar writing around 2600 AD, supplies an introduction and long footnotes. Meredith sometimes corrects Avis and sometimes shows his own limited grasp of the period, and London uses that layering to comment on both. The book’s foreword reveals that the Everhards die as martyrs.