Description
First paperback edition, first printing. Published by Penguin in London, 1958. This is a very good copy. The soft covers are toned and lightly marked throughout. The corners are bumped. The spine tips are bumped and split at the bottom and there are handling marks to the rear panel. The front hinge is mostly separated. The internals are clean, however, though there is a small previous owners signature in pencil to the front inside cover. The text blocks are clean throughout, though with one small mark to the bottom of the rear panel. Overall, this is a very good copy.
The novel has been listed as the sixth best-selling title (any language, including reference works). The plot is structured around the ten lines of the children’s counting rhyme. Each of the ten victims – eight guests plus the island’s two caretakers – is killed in a manner which reflects one of the lines of the rhyme. The recent owner of the island is also killed, but on the mainland and before the story begins. Both of the original US publications changed the title from that originally used in the UK to “And Then There Were None”, due to the offensiveness of the word in American culture, where it was more widely perceived as a racially loaded ethnic slur or insult compared to the contemporaneous culture in the United Kingdom.
