Silent Spring. Drawings By Lois And Louis Darling. Carson, Rachel.

First edition, first printing, with the bookplate of the publisher Alfred Knopf to the front pastedown and his marginal notation to the contents; one annotation asks "why not name?" (p. 35), regarding the chemical companies involved in misconduct. Knopf, a committed environmentalist and a correspondent of Carson, published contemporary works on pesticides, including Murray Bookchin's Our Synthetic Environment just a few months before Silent Spring. Knopf advocated the conservation of national parks and forests. "With such contacts as National Parks Service Director Newton B. Drury, writer Freeman Tilden, and historian Bernard DeVoto, Knopf encouraged the publication of environmentally progressive titles and wrote numerous letters to legislators urging land conservation. In 1950 he joined the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings, and Monuments of the National Park Service, serving as chairman for five years" (University of Texas). The title page is dated "10/4/62" in blue ink, presumably the date that Knopf acquired the copy; the book was published the week before, on 27 September 1962. Silent Spring, Carson's indictment of the pesticide industry, was of enormous consequence to the grassroots environmental movement and the rise of ecofeminism. A nature writer and Editor-in-Chief for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson had long been concerned about the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides, but lack of interest from magazine publishers led her to put aside her idea for an exposé. When the book finally appeared in 1962, only a year before her death, its great strength was not in presenting new information - most of the data she included was already known to the scientific community - but in making the information accessible to non-scientists and instilling a sense of fear and urgency in the public. Her book also challenged the very foundations of post-war modernity and forced humans to reconsider their relationship to the world around them. Two newspaper clippings on Carson are laid in: one a contemporary review and one dated 2012. "Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Records (Manuscript Collection MS-00062): Biographical Sketch", University of Texas at Austin, accessible online. Octavo. Original green cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt, green vertical wavy-patterned endpapers, top edge yellow. With dust jacket. Title-page vignette, line-drawn chapter headings. Corners and spine ends lightly rubbed and bumped, cloth clean, gilt bright; creasing to unclipped jacket extremities, nicks to same resulting in a little loss at head of spine, 23 mm closed tear to front flap: a very good copy in very good jacket.