The Social Cancer - 1912

Manila: Philippine Education Company, 1912. First unabridged English-language edition. lviii, 502 pp. Bound in publisher's tan cloth with dark crimson stamping. Very Good+ with light dust-soiling and mustiness, former owner's bookplate on front paste down, two early 20th century photos of the Philippines tipped into pages lvi and lvii at front. A few small hand-corrections in ink to text. Small clipping about this novel laid in with offsetting to adjacent pages. In Fair dust jacket missing bottom half of spine panel, chipped at head and along edges, split in panels mended with archival tissue on verso. A cornerstone of Filipino literature. The author's first novel, titled Noli Me Tangere in the original Spanish. It was first published in Berlin in 1887. Two abridged American English translations followed in 1900. It is required reading for high school students in the Philippines in English, Filipino, and various regional languages (and yet not Spanish), as it inspired the Philippine Revolution against the Spanish and then the Americans. Rizal is considered a national hero in the way that George Washington is to Americans, but crossed with Dostoyevsky (as he is for many Russians), a chronicler of the national soul.