Player Piano.

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,, 1952. A rather frightening preview of the Age of Electronics First edition, first printing, of the author's first book. Player Piano, which depicts a dystopia in which society is almost entirely mechanized, was partially inspired by Vonnegut's time working for General Electric and was nominated for the International Fantasy Award in 1953. In this book, Vonnegut criticizes a society that completely replaces human endeavour with machinery, creating a sense of purposelessness and indifference. "To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do", he said of General Electric's gradual replacement of skilled workers with machines, "but it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs" (quoted in Hicks p. 26). Octavo. Original green boards, spine lettered in silver. With dust jacket. Housed in a custom dark red cloth flat-backed box. Spine sunned, foot toned, tiny bumps to corners and head of front cover, endpapers lightly foxed; jacket sunned, spine ends and corners a little chipped and nicked, mark on rear flap, unclipped: a very good copy in like jacket. Currey, p. 503; Pieratt AA1. Heather J. Hicks, The Culture of Soft Work, 2009.