Umberto Eco - Quattro prime edizioni: Il pendolo di Foucault + L’isola del giorno prima + La misteriosa fiamma - 1988-2010

Umberto Eco: four first editions, the lot contains:

The Foucault Pendulum – Milan, Bompiani, first edition, first printing: October 1988, SIAE mark 130742. large 8vo, 16 x 24 cm, red cloth binding with gold titles to the spine, illustrated dust jacket, 509 pages numbered, (8) unnumbered pages with the chapter index and the illustration index. Conditions: dust jacket in perfect condition, top edge slightly yellowed, solid binding, excellent conservation state.
The Foucault Pendulum is the second novel by the Italian writer, semiologist and philosopher Umberto Eco,
The book is structured in 120 chapters divided into ten macro-segments, each titled like one of the Sephirot (the ten divine emanations of the Jewish Kabbalah, such as Keter, Hokmah, Binah, etc.).
Eco uses narrative to dismantle the mechanism by which “everything can be connected to everything.” The novel demonstrates how the obsessive search for hidden secrets leads to losing touch with reality, creating forced connections even where none exist.
Pendulum as a symbol: The physical device invented by Léon Foucault in 1851 (which demonstrates the Earth’s rotation) represents in the novel the illusion of a “fixed point” and unchanging in the universe. Esotericists seek in the pendulum’s suspension point the center of the world, but in the end they will discover that beneath it there is only emptiness
“The editor would like to announce that love, passion, death, Satanism, salvation, perversion (all under Jim the Hemp’s palms) intertwine in this book that has not left the author to sleep. But the matter is unfortunately more complex. If it was easy to define The Name of the Rose as a novel that unfolds in seven days in a small place and in a precise year, the publisher feels embarrassed to define the units of time, place and action of this Pendulum of Foucault. It unfolds from the early seventies to 1984 between a Milanese publishing house and a Parisian museum where The Foucault Pendulum is on display, with a negligible aside of a few years in Brazil. It unfolds from 1943 to 1945 in a small town between Langhe and Monferrato. It unfolds from the second century AD to the present day through the saga of Hermetic knowledge. It unfolds between 1344 and 2000 along the route of the Templar and Rosicrucian plans for world domination. It unfolds entirely on the night of June 23, 1984, first upright in the gunner’s perch, then upright in the perch of the Statue of Liberty at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. It unfolds the night between June 26 and 27 of the same year in the old country house that Jacopo Belbo, the protagonist, inherited from his uncle Carlo, while Pim, the protagonist, recalls the temporal sequences described above. In short: three editorial editors, in Milan, after having frequented too long authors “at their own expense” who dabble in occult sciences, secret societies, and cosmic conspiracies, decide to invent, without any sense of responsibility, a Plan. But someone takes them seriously.” (from the blurbs)
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Umberto Eco: L’isola del giorno prima – Milan, Bompiani, first edition, first printing: September 1994, ISBN 88-452-2318-3. octavo, 14 x 22 cm, red cloth binding with gold titles to the spine, illustrated dust jacket, 476 pages numbered, (10) unnumbered pages with the publisher’s literary and essayistic series index. Conditions: dust jacket in perfect condition, solid binding, excellent conservation state.
The Island of the Day Before is the third novel by Umberto Eco. The work, set in the XVII century, blends adventure fiction and historical novel with a deep philosophical reflection focused on the search for longitude and the Baroque mentality.
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Umberto Eco: La misteriosa fiamma della Regina Loana – Milan, Bompiani, first edition, first printing: June 2004, SIAE mark S 00141190, ISBN 88-452-1425-7, in 8vo, 14 x 22 cm, white cloth binding with black titles to the spine, illustrated dust jacket, 451 pages numbered, (2) unnumbered pages with the index of chapters, includes a wide and rich color and black-and-white iconographic apparatus (dust jackets of antique books, comics, records, clippings and school notebooks) listed in the “Sources of quotations and illustrations,” where the author indicates the provenance of the visual material reproduced in the text. Conditions: dust jacket in perfect condition, solid binding, a fresh copy, excellent conservation state.
La misteriosa fiamma della Regina Loana is Umberto Eco’s fifth autobiographical and illustrated novel. The protagonist, a sixty-year-old man struck by total amnesia of autobiographical memory, undertakes a journey into his childhood through mementos and childhood memories in the family home in the Langhe to rediscover his identity.
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Umberto Eco: Il Cimitero di Praga – Milan, Bompiani, first edition, first printing: October 2010, SIAE mark DP 0098079261, ISBN 978-88-452-6622-5, in 8vo, 14 x 21 cm, white cloth binding with titles to the spine and to the front board, illustrated dust jacket, 523 pages numbered, (2) unnumbered pages with the index of chapters. Conditions: dust jacket in perfect condition, solid binding, a fresh copy, excellent conservation state.
Il cimitero di Praga is Eco’s sixth novel, a historical novel and a thriller of the period that revolves around the birth of modern antisemitism and the creation of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the fraudulent document that theorized a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Eco explores how a lie, if repeated enough and built to satisfy public prejudices, can become a widely accepted historical “truth,” with tragic consequences.

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