This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 4/26/2022
CLARKE, Arthur C. (1917–2008). 2001 A Space Odyssey. [New York:] The New American Library, [1968]. 8vo. Original publisher’s black and blue boards, illustrated endpapers (a touch of toning along edges); original unclipped dust jacket (few tiny tears along top edges, old tape repair verso). Provenance: Frederick C. Durant III (1916–2015), book–label of a significant space scientist and author. FIRST EDITION of the author’s novelization based on the joint screenplay by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. With the success of both the book and film, Clarke “became perhaps the best–known science fiction writer in the world” (Clarke & Nicholls, p. 231). Clarke’s novel, the first in an eventual tetralogy, is “about two things [he] seems to think we mortals would most like to know in a universe in which we can only hope that the odds are in favor of the race’s survival: that we are not alone and that we have not lived in vain” (John Hollow). INSCRIBED BY CLARKE TO DURANT on half–title: To Pip & Fred – / with love / Arthur / Chevy Chase / 24 Oct. ‘77”. Fredrick C. Durant III was “a leading figure in the pantheon of space pioneers” (San Francisco Chronicle) who “was heavily involved in rocketry in the United States during the period between the end of World War II and the mid–1960s. He worked for several different aerospace organizations… [and] later became the director of astronautics for the National Air and Space Museum” (NASA). Durant helped organize Project Orbiter, which culminated in the launch of Explorer I in 1958, the first American satellite and the instrument that discovered the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts. He also co–authored The Art of Chesley Bonestell, to which Clarke contributed a foreword and which won a Hugo Award for best non–fiction book in 2002. A WONDERFUL ASSOCIATION COPY of Clarke’s vision of humanity’s future in space inscribed to one of the leading scientists in the field of space exploration. Barron, Anatomy of Wonder 4–159; Currey, p. 115.