Beautiful first edition, first issue copy of Roald Dahl's most famous work, with six-line colophon, that precedes the British edition by three years.<ul><li>Roald Dahl (English).</li><li>Illustrations by Joseph Schindelman (American).</li><li>New York:&nbsp;Alfred A. Knopf,&nbsp;1964.</li><li>162 pages.</li><li>Octavo.</li><li>Bound in publisher’s red cloth with illustrated dust jacket.</li></ul>

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

First edition, in the first issue dust jacket, of the great chocolatier fantasy of desire fulfilled.<ul><li>Roald Dahl (English).</li><li>Illustrated by Joseph Schindelman (English).</li><li>New York:&nbsp;Alfred A. Knopf,&nbsp;1964.</li><li>6 line colophon; [12], 162 pages.</li><li>Black and white illustrations throughout.</li><li>Bound in original blind-stamped red cloth boards with gilt-titled to spine, in original unclipped ($3.95) pictorial dust jacket, purple topstain, gold endpapers.</li></ul> Dahl's Dickensian tale of a good-hearted waif rescued from poverty by literature's most stylish factory owner, drawing powerfully on the author's remembered childhood miseries and later post-war deprivation. Charlie's wish for a Golden Ticket, more than the uncomplicated greed animating the book's less virtuous children, is an unfathomable longing for sweetness, for a taste of wonder in a grey and oppressive world. Meanwhile, Wonka's chaotic energy drives the story to its greatest heights. As the walled chocolate garden's grotesqueries reward a child-reader's basest narrative instincts, each unworthy child is punished according to his or her character and just desserts, in sequences as merciless as a medieval morality play. For these disquieting episodes, and for the sheer material lavishness of Charlie's ultimate reward, the novel was derided by Eleanor Cameron as "one of the most tasteless books ever written for children, no better than a television show"; Ursula Le Guin concurred, likening its effects to "a tiny psychological fugue, very like that provided by comic books." Children continue, lawlessly, to adore it.

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