Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s brutally honest account of his experience as a militiaman during the Spanish Civil War. The Folio Society edition is illustrated with 35 black and white photographs sourced from Magnum and Catalan archives.

When civil war broke out in Spain in 1936, Orwell, like many other European socialists, was quick to join the fight against Fascism. And so, in December that year, he found himself in Catalonia with a 40-year-old rifle, no helmet, uniform, maps or tools, and a platoon of near children under his command.

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Quarter-bound in blocked cloth with printed cloth sides

Set in Plantin

296 pages

Frontispiece and 35 black & white integrated photographs

Blocked slipcase

9½˝ × 6¼˝

A CHANGE IN THE AIR

FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

A PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORD

As Orwell’s evocative writing transports us to the heart of the revolution, so the atmospheric black and white photographs offer vivid snapshots of the struggle, capturing camaraderie and hardship in equal measure. Child soldiers sew tattered blankets; bedraggled troops march defiantly; and the Barcelona Ritz is repurposed as a workers’ restaurant.

Our edition is illustrated with 35 black and white images, many sourced direct from Magnum and Catalan archives and including work by the great photojournalists Robert Capa and  Agusti Centelles. The PAG Revolucion typeface, typical of propaganda posters, reflects the socialist struggle, while Spanish red adorns the cloth binding and frames a Robert Capa photo of an International Brigades fighter raising a clenched fist – the ‘anti-fascist salute’ that was the defiant gesture of the Civil War

ABOUT GEORGE ORWELL

George Orwell (1903–50) was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, India (where his father worked for the Civil Service) into what he would later call a ‘lower-upper-middle class’ family. The family returned to England in 1907 and, after studying at Eton, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police Force in Burma. Whilst in Burma he developed a critical attitude towards authority, which he evoked in his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). He resigned from the police force in 1927 and took to exploring the poverty of his home country; travelling, observing and often living as a tramp, with a view to becoming a writer. He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals.

His first work of non-fiction, Down and Out in Paris and London, was published in 1936, and in the same year he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was his powerful description of the poverty he saw there. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, experiencing the factionalism breaking apart the Republican cause and became virulently anti-Communist, a stance reflected in his Homage to Catalonia (1938). During the Second World War Orwell served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service. As literary editor of Tribune, he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary and also wrote for the Observer and the Manchester Evening News. His political satire Animal Farm was published shortly after the end of the war in 1945, and it was this novel, together with Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), that brought him worldwide fame. Orwell’s letters and diaries have been published posthumously by The Folio Society as an exclusive edition, selected and introduced by Orwell expert Peter Davison.