On this date in history : June 8, 1949 was publication of George Orwell's _1984_ novel

from George Orwell Novels dot-com -- historical data on the original publication Nineteen Eighty-Four was published by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949. It was published five days later by Harcourt, Brace and Company in New York. Secker & Warburg printed 26,575 copies for the first edition; a second impression, of 5,570 copies, was issued in March 1950, and a third impression, of 5,150 copies, in August 1950. A second edition, entirely reset, was ordered in December 1950. Harcourt, Brace ordered 20,000 copies for its initial print run, and two further impressions, of 10,000 copies each, were issued on 1 July and 7 September 1949; fourth and fifth impressions, of 4,100 and 5,000 copies, were issued on 3 February and in June 1950. A Book-of-the-Month Club edition was issued in the United States in July 1949, and by March 1952 had sold 190,000 copies. Warburg gives figures for later printings and initial reactions to the book in All Authors Are Equal. The novel was very widely reviewed. Bernard Crick summarises initial reactions and devotes a long section of his annotated Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) to ‘The Contemporary Reaction’. On 31 July 1949, The New York Times Book Review stated that some sixty reviews, coast-to-coast, were ‘Overwhelmingly (90 per cent) admiring, with cries of terror rising above the applause. . . . Few paid more than passing attention to the novel as fiction. . . . The emphasis was on the political ‘prophecy’ involved. . . . Even the ordinarily breezy New Yorker was so shaken that it found itself endorsing something awesome called Orwell’s “moral centrality.”‘ L[ouis] A[deane] in Freedom (11 June 1949) began by suggesting: ‘If it is true that satire admits an element of hope, then this novel is not satirical: it is a grim and convincing attack on the centralised State and on modern warfare, and its power is due to the complete pessimism with which every page is stamped’; he concluded: ‘Only an honest man could have written this book, and it is desolating that in our world such honesty should lead to such despair. Out of his despair, Orwell has made a protest more complete and more sustained than any other writer of his generation, and for this he deserves our praise and gratitude.’