"Samuel Butler's Notebooks", Selections edited by Geoffrey Keynes and Brian Hill, published by Dutton, New York, 1st US Edition, 1st printing, 1951.

Original price un-clipped dust jacket [some edge wear and small creases], hard boards, original publisher's cloth, 5.1/2" x 8"; 327 pages including index, very good binding and condition.

Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel "Erewhon" (1872) and the semi-autobiographical "The Way of All Flesh", published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.

Early in his life Samuel Butler began to carry a note-book and to write down in it anything he wanted to remember; it might be something he heard some one say, more commonly it was something he said himself. In one of these notes he gives a reason for making them:

"One's thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot them; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails."

So he bagged as many as he could hit and preserved them, re-written on loose sheets of paper which constituted a sort of museum stored with the wise, beautiful, and strange creatures that were continually winging their way across the field of his vision.

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