London published this in 1908 and then had to live with it. The socialists he wrote it for called it a wrecking job that would scare off the moderates, the reviewers called it hysterical, and it sold badly enough to be treated for decades as the strange book by the man who wrote the dog stories. Trotsky went back to it in 1937 and said London had seen the shape of the thing thirty years early. Orwell wrote about it in 1940, weighed it against Huxley, and gave it the point that matters: Huxley predicted a soft cage, London predicted the boot.
The frame is seven centuries out. What the reader holds is the Everhard Manuscript, written by Avis Cunningham while the Mercenaries were already on the road, hidden in the hollow of an oak at Wake Robin Lodge, and dug out again by a scholar named Anthony Meredith who annotates it from a world where all of this has been settled so long that her ordinary words need glossing. He is amused by her. That is the cruelty of the device, and it is the whole novel: you read her terror through a footnote written by a man for whom it is a finished subject.
Avis is a professor's daughter in Berkeley who invites a working man to her father's table so the guests can laugh at him. Ernest Everhard takes the table apart instead. He is a horseshoer who taught himself the philosophers, and what he tells the bishop and the businessmen over the soup is that the machine those men believe they own is about to eat them, and that it will not stop when it has. Inside two years her father has lost his chair, the small firms are gone, and the favoured union castes are living behind their own walls while everybody else goes down into the abyss.
Nothing in these twenty five chapters stops it. The Oligarchy buys the strongest unions outright, plants its own men inside the revolution, and lets the Chicago Commune rise a season early so it can be shot in the streets. London gives the Iron Heel three hundred years of life, and then has Meredith mention its fall in a footnote, in passing, the way a man mentions a date every schoolchild has. The manuscript stops in the middle of a sentence. Avis heard something and never came back to the page, and the note printed under the break is the only account there is of what happened to her.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of the 1908 Macmillan text entire, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 242 pages. London's epigraph, Meredith's foreword with his signature and dateline, all twenty five chapters under their own names, and every one of Meredith's 124 notes set at the foot of the page carrying its marker, numbered fresh in each chapter. The notes are the second voice of the novel and they are not apparatus, so they are not banished to the back. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the transcriber's furniture.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
