“HUXLEY’S MOST IMPORTANT WORK OF NON-FICTION”: FIRST EDITION OF ALDOUS HUXLEY’S DOORS OF PERCEPTION, 1954

HUXLEY, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. London: Chatto & Windus, 1954. Slim octavo, original blue cloth, original dust jacket. $1350.

First edition of Aldous Huxley’s illuminating work on his experience with mescalin in 1953, revealing more of Huxley “than all his books put together… the unfathomable Mystery—which haunted him all his life” (Juliette Huxley), scarce in original dust jacket.

Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) "set a model for writers of his generation," took mescalin under a doctor's supervision in 1953 (New York Times). That day, "when Huxley 'swallowed four-tenths of a gramme of mescalin dissolved in half a glass of water,' was to leave its mark on contemporary history" (Hull, Aldous Huxley, 459). In Doors of Perception (a title drawn from Blake), Huxley explores the experience that he saw as a means of being "shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception." He contemplates humanity's desire "to transcend self-conscious selfhood" and considers the many insights of writers, philosophers and artists—from Van Gogh to Dante, Zen Masters to Groucho Marx. To J.G. Ballard, Doors of Perception ranks "as Huxley's most important work of non-fiction" (Hull, 1). David Dunaway, in Huxley in Hollywood, quotes Juliette Huxley's sense of Doors as key to revealing more of the "questing Aldous than all his books put together… the unfathomable Mystery—which haunted him all his life." To Dunaway, Doors and Art of Seeing (1942) "comprise his most extended autobiography" (297).

Text clean, book with offsetting to free endpapers, light spotting to upper text block edge, slight rubbing to lower board edges. Dust jacket with only minor rubbing and toning, nicks to extremities. An extremely good copy in the scarce original dust jacket.