DUNNE, John William (1866-1949). An Experiment with Time, London, 1927, 8vo, original blue buckram, dust-jacket. FIRST EDITION. RARE, particularly in the dust-jacket.

DUNNE, John William (1866-1949).  An Experiment with Time. London: A. & C. Black, 1927. 8vo (218 x 140mm). Half title, woodcut printer's device on title, diagrams. Original dark blue buckram, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, tan dust-jacket lettered and ruled in black with printer's device stamped on lower wrapper (small piece torn away from foot of backstrip of jacket without loss of letters, some chipping to head of backstrip and corners, price-clipped). Provenance: some pencil annotation to front free endpaper ("Robert, have you ever encountered this before?"). FIRST EDITION. A note from the publisher, printed in cursive script on the upper wrapper of the dust-jacket, states, "The author's challenge to our present day conceptions of the universe is altogether too weighty to be ignored. It is a very serious and disturbing contribution." J. W. Dunne was "... a pioneer aircraft designer and author of the widely-read An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934), in which he outlined a theory of time to account for such phenomena as precognition, previsional dreaming, etc. He quotes in support Wells' The Time Machine, but Wells was to reply that Dunne had taken his concept of 'duration as a dimension of space' too seriously. Dunne's concept proved a useful dramatic device to J. B. Priestley in his 'Time' plays, and is mentioned with interest by G[raham] Greene (who asks if it is possible for novelists to draw their symbols from the future as well as from the past: see Ways of Escape, ch. 3)" (The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. M. Drabble, 1985). RARE, particularly in the scarce dust-jacket.