"OUR MISSION, COMRADES, IS TO AVOID DETECTION": FIRST EDITION OF TOM CLANCY'S THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER

CLANCY, Tom. The Hunt for Red October. Annapolis: Naval Institute, (1984). Octavo, original red cloth, original dust jacket. $1500.

First edition of Clancy's "breathlessly exciting" first novel (Washington Post).

Insurance agent Clancy's first novel and the first fiction published by the Naval Institute Press, The Hunt for Red October became a surprise best-seller and one of President Reagan's favorite books; he called it "the perfect yarn." Clancy based the book on interviews with intelligence officers and extensive research in publicly available sources; however, at a White House lunch in 1985, then-Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr., told the author, "If you were a naval officer, I would have you court-martialed because of all the classified information in your book" (New York Times). Made into the 1990 film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin. First edition, published by the Naval Institute Press and printed in Annapolis, with neither statement of edition nor series of numbers on copyright page, no price on dust jacket and six blurbs on rear panel.

Book fine, dust jacket with light rubbing to extremities, two tape repairs to verso. An extremely good copy.