Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/09/dover-edition-of-edwin-abbott.html
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$1.71 for the paper back, I’m in.
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Dover is a great source for cheap public domain books. Order once from them and they’ll give you catalogs forever.
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I read it once when I was very young and I loved it. All the satire of society went right over my head, but it did instill a love of math in me.
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Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces & an Expanding Universe by Dionys Burger is an excellent companion / sequel / also-read. It’s (partly) the adventure of a three-dimensional sphere in Flatland. Since only one plane of its body can appear in Flatland, the beings see it as a circle.
I really enjoyed it, and recommend it highly.
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What a funny synchronicity/possible piece of evidence for higher dimensionality as-seen in 3D space/4D space time — I was just talking about this book with someone intently a couple hours ago. 
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There are at least two spiffy movie versions readily available.
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Also available as a free audio file from Librevox
Seconded. Flatterland by mathematician Ian Stewart is also worth reading, as is Rudy Rucker’s characteristically psychedelic Spaceland.
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there’s also AK Dewdney’s Planiverse which as I recall got pretty “technical” (read it many years ago, not fresh in mind… Dewdney was a math rec columnist for SciAm , wrote some interesting stuff for a while, now apparently not… ) And then “Dragon’s Egg” a novel by Robert Forward about life on a neutron star, essentially flatland.
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I’ve not read Planiverse (though it’s on my long reading list). It hadn’t occurred to me to put Dragon’s Egg in the Flatland-inspired categories, but now that you mention it it makes perfect sense. Good call. It is indeed among my favorite hard-SF novels, and probably my favorite one by Foward (I enjoyed Timemaster and Rochwworld, but Dragon’s Egg is better written).
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“Flatland” should be required reading in every high school in America. (If not earlier; it’s an easy read.) A great prep for modern multidimensional physics.
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I’d recommend it for anyone who thinks they might be interested in math. I wouldn’t put it on a general required reading list.
Obligs:
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I sent a copy of Flatland to materialist/reductionist son. “Cool” was his response…
I am such a failure as a parent 
I first heard about it in How Real is Real?* by Paul Watzlawick, who focused more on the “sphere is a circle in the 2D universe” aspect. I read Flatland a short time later, when I found it in a bookstore. At the time, the Victorian satire went right over my head, and I wondered why the hell Abbott went to such great lengths to build such a sexist universe.
*IIRC it was listed alongside, & compared with, the Principia Discordia in the Loompanics catalog. I was lucky enough to find a remaindered copy shortly after reading about it.
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Hate to say it, but future reprints would benefit from a preface explaining the cultural satire. These days even literature is in want of a sarcasm warning. Call it Poe’s preface.
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Or you know, it’s also available free:
If it’s public domain, always check Project Gutenberg.
Amazon frequently has works from Project Gutenberg (usually lousily repackaged - this one is actually quite nice) for sale for peanuts on the basis that Amazon is huge and people will come across the e-book and think “that’s cheap”.
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Many Dover publications are public domain. They specialize in cheap books aimed at students who often need a physical copy but can’t afford more expensive bindings. Despite the terrible bindings, I have about a dozen Dover books in my library because they were either out of print or the in-print versions were prohibitively expensive. Back in the day e-books were scarce and rarely acceptable at university. I do wonder if colleges are more open to e-books nowadays. They ought to be.
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