The Secret Lives of Used Books (Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler)

Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler (New York: Macmillan, 1941). Photograph by Paige Zobenica.

Christmas 1941. Pearl Harbor was a smoking ruin. British and American forces were being put to rout in the Pacific. Western conservatives, after years of passively preferring Nazism to communism, found themselves at war with Hitler and in league with Stalin. And Cliff, Alice, and Jay rang in the season, with love, by giving Bill a copy of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), a novel about the Moscow show trials.

Inscription. Photograph by Jon Zobenica.