Canfield, Chauncey L. [Editor]

The Diary of a Forty-Niner

San Francisco Morgan Shepard Company 1906, First edition. This copy with a presentation inscription, SIGNED by the author. Very rare thus! xiii, [9], 231pp. Frontis map. Cloth-backed pictorial boards, gilt-lettered. Spine rubbed, especially at head and foot, edges of board show wear, stamp to top edges, some light scarring to inner covers from removed pocket or bookplate, front and rear inner hinges starting. A very good copy. The first edition of this work is extremely scarce. Although reprinted a number of times, the first edition offered here is very difficult to find. The 49er was Alfred T. Jackson, a Connecticut man who spent two years in the California mines at Nevada County. "Fiction, but of notable quality as a depiction of Gold Rush life and times" (Wheat). According to Rocq and Gudde, the diary is a romanticized story based on the recollections of a miner named Lewis Hanchett and Canfield's own research. Oscar Lewis, in the 1947 edition, presents a fascinating account of the publication history of the book and how the fire in San Francisco in 1906 destroyed the entire run of the initial printing while in the process of being bound, how Canfield transferred the publishing of the work to New York, and how another fire in New York in 1908 destroyed much of the "new" first edition. "Two thousand copies were printed of which 1,200 were burned" (Kurutz). [Cowan: p.104; Graff: 571; Howes I: C-111; Howes II: C-112; Kurutz: 114a; Rocq: 5975; Wheat: 34].

• USD 275.00 > other currencies
• ordernr.: 4755

• bookseller: Argonaut Book Shop (USA)