Pun Salad

Somehow, a very old hardcover edition of Animal Farm wound up on my bookshelf. Published by Harcourt Brace, compyright 1946. Five years before I was born. No idea how I wound up with it.

Gee, I wonder if it's worth anything to collectors? Checking Google's AI…

Well, it's not going to send anyone to college, but my heirs probably won't want to throw it in the dumpster either.

Anyway, I first read Animal Farm as a kid, probably 60 or so years ago. (Not this edition. The edition I read back then was illustrated.) I was inspired to reread it, ironically, by Nicholas Clairmont's pan of the recent movie adaptation, which was characterized "the exact opposite of what the author intended." Orwellian!

But back to the book: it is an unsubtle allegory of the early history of the Soviet Union, starting with the oppressed beasts of Mr. Jones' "Manor Farm", inspired by the harangues of the old boar, Major, chasing off Jones and taking over themselves. Major's ideology drives them to rename their conquest "Animal Farm", they establish commandments, sing inspirational songs, and bleat the famous slogan: "Four legs good, two legs bad."

The parallels are many, and readers will pick up more of them the more they know about early 20th-century Russian history. (Or they can just peruse the Wikipedia page.)

Although Orwell's original subtitle of this work was "A Fairy Story", it's also horror-filled. Probably not the best bedtime reading to your toddlers, because things get explicitly violent. It is pretty much a fictionalization of Chapter 10 of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, "Why the Worst Get on Top".