Eco, Umberto

Travels in Hyperreality

ISBN: 0151910790
Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1986. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. "Two very beautiful naked girls are crouched facing each other." (opening sentence, Travels in Hyperreality, pg. 1). Travels in Hyperreality, written by Italian medievalist philosopher & journalist Umberto Eco (1932-2016) and translated by William Weaver, is a compilation assembled for English-language readers from three Italian collections of his journalism and occasional essays, Il costume di casa (1973), Dalla periferia dell'impero (1977), and Sette anni di desiderio (1983), originally written for L'Espresso and Il Manifesto. The title essay comes out of a 1975 tour of American wax museums, Hearst Castle, Disneyland, Ripley's, the Palace of Living Arts & the Madonna Inn. Eco's thesis was that America had a peculiar appetite for the "absolute fake," the reconstruction that doesn't apologize for being a copy but claims to improve on the original with "hyperreality" being the condition where the copy no longer refers back to an original at all. The rest of the collection is deliberately miscellaneous with The Return of the Middle Ages (his neomedievalism essay, the intellectual seedbed of his international bestseller The Name of the Rose), Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage, Lumbar Thought (on what wearing blue jeans does to the wearer's self-consciousness), pieces on the World Cup, on the Red Brigades & cult-leader Jim Jones. Eco was a rare book collector himself with over 1,300 volumes with the organizing principle of "error." He collected what people had sincerely believed and been wrong about, on the theory that the history of error tells you more about how meaning works than the history of correctness does. From the collection of Laurence Goldstein (1943-2023), poet, editor, and professor in the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature. Hardcover in unclipped Dust Jacket: First Edition per copyright page, first printing as stated by letter sequence thereon. A most collectible compilation of journalism & essays in its rarest contemporary form with distinguished provenance. Book in relatively fine-to-very fine condition with mild age-toning & rubbing mostly to top fine edge of front cover, back cover & spine; mild bumping of bottom corner of front cover; an occasion of spot-staining to bottom fine edge of back cover from former distributor remainder mark; former distributor's black remainder mark vertically stricken down center of bottom text block; mild age-toning to fine edges of same. Interior fine-to-very fine with mild age-toning mostly to blank margins/fine edges of page leaves. Dust Jacket fine-to-very fine with mild-to-moderate age-toning, rubbing & creasing mostly to fine edges of front, back covers, spine & flaps; mild rubbing to back cover. Fine-Very Fine / Fine-Very Fine. [Item #9389]

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