H.G Wells - The World Set Free - HB 1st UK Edition 1914

First UK edition. Original blind stamped green cloth, lettered in gilt to front and spine , without the ( relatively rare) dustjacket.  Top edge in gilt. An solid very good copy,  toned to the spine and edges. Rubbing and softenming to all corners and the head and tail of spine. Internally unmarked. The lower edge of the page block has a partly faded splatter mark. 

First published serially in The English Review, though with a different ending, from December 1913 to May 1914, The World Set Free was the final part of what Wells considered his (loose - not linked by characters or plot) SF trilogy of "fantasias of possibility", preceded by The War In The Air (1908) and When The Sleeper Wakes (1899).

286 pages with six pages of publisher's advertisements at rear. 

Small booksellers label from a Bristol bookshop on inside rear cover. 

The novel is notable for Wells's prediction of the nuclear bomb, where he describes "long, coffin-shaped box which contained in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far had ever seen in action." Leo Szilard, who conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, later wrote in his memoir of that conception "knowing what it would mean - and I knew because I had read HG Wells - I did not want this patent to become public."