The God of the Machine. by PATERSON, Isabel - 1943

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1943. The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world" (Ayn Rand) First edition, first printing, of the author's best-known work, a seminal text of American libertarianism.
A leading Canadian-American journalist and esteemed literary critic, Paterson (1886-1961) is credited as one of the "three furies" of the American libertarian movement alongside Ayn Rand and Rose Wilder Lane (William F. Buckley Jr. quoted by Burns, p. 746).
In a lengthy and strongly-worded letter to Earle H. Balch, an editor at G. P. Putnam's Sons, Rand stressed the importance of Paterson's book and advised in great detail the best methods of publicizing its release, arguing that "The God of the Machine is a document that could literally save the world - if enough people knew of it and read it. [It] does for capitalism what the Bible did for Christianity - and, forgive the comparison, what Das Kapital did for Communism or Mein Kampf for Nazism. It takes a book to save or destroy the world" (28 November, 1943). The God of the Machine was published in the same year as Rand's The Fountainhead. Octavo. Original orange cloth, spine lettered and blocked in blue, top edge blue, fore edge untrimmed. Slight peripheral rubbing, slight cockling at head of rear cover, endpapers toned; a square, near-fine copy. See Michael S. Berliner, ed, Letters of Ayn Rand (Penguin, 1997); Jennifer Burns, "The Three 'Furies' of Libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand", Journal of American History, Vol. 102, Issue 3, Dec. 2015, pp. 746-74.