Wyndham (John) The Day of the Triffids

New York, Doubleday & Company, 1951.

First US edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.

The book itself needs little introduction: the blinding green meteor shower, the walking carnivorous plants, Bill Masen unbandaging his eyes in a silent hospital, and the entire template of British catastrophe fiction (traced forward through Christopher, Ballard and, by its director’s own admission, 28 Days Later) laid down in one stroke.

What’s interesting here is that the Doubleday edition printing precedes the Michael Joseph London edition, making it the true first in book form. It is also textually distinct, the story having had a famously tangled birth: Wyndham’s original draft gave the triffids a Soviet origin; Doubleday balked, a rewrite relocated them to Venus, Doubleday balked again, and the firm finally published the original conception shorn of some ten thousand words, while Collier’s, serialising the abridged Revolt of the Triffids’ in early 1951, ran the Venusian version. The result: the Doubleday, the Joseph and the serial are three variant texts of the same masterpiece.