JOHN STEINBECK: OF MICE & MEN/LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB/FLETCHER MARTIN/1970 SIGNED

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JOHN STEINBECK: OF MICE & MEN/LIMITED EDITIONS CLUB/FLETCHER MARTIN/1970 SIGNED OF MICE AND MEN. BY JOHN STEINBECK. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLETCHER MARTIN AND AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN T. WINTERICH. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1970. Signed by Artist. Limited Edition. First Edition, thus. Very Scarce. A handsome very large and beautifully illustrated signed book. Published more than 40 years ago, it is now long out of print and hard to find. Such a nice copy is not likely to come up for sale again soon on ebay. From the Colophon: "Of this edition, fifteen hundred copies have been printed for the members of The Limited Editions Club at the Press of A. Colish, Mount Vernon, New York. The formats was designed by Fletcher Martin, who made the illustrations. This is copy number1097 [Fletcher Martin]" From the Introduction: "John Ernst Steinbeck, novelist, short-story writer, sindicated columnist, dramatist, motion-picture script writer, essayist, reporter, whilom poet, and general surveyor of the human scene, was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902. The valley of the Salinas River is one of this nation's great fruit baskets, vegetable bins, and grain repositors. But the general area is by no means lacking in literary associations. The first unit of Frank Norris' three-volume epic of the wheat, called The Octopus, was published the year before John Steinbeck was born; the setting was the Salinas valley. Later Robinson Jeffers, though not a native son (neither was Frank Norris), made California's Big Sur country his own. Edwin Markham, a native of rural Oregon, grew up in central California, turned poet, and was widely read by thousnads who had not previously gone in for poetry. He will always be remembered for The Man with the Hoe (1899), which many people considered pretty radical, but men who wieldd hoes for a living did not regard it as radical enough. Judge for yourself: Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Sixty-odd years before Markham achieved his pinnacle of fame, a temporary dropout from Harvard College had stepped ashore at the port of Monterey, California, where John Steinbeck's father would one day serve as county treasurer. The young man was Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who had embarked at Boston on a two-year voyage designed to cure his ailing eyesight, which had been damaged by an attack of measles. At Monterey, young Dana had been a member of a work detail charged with stowing aboard cattle-hides, which, he whimsically philosophized, would be taken to Massachusetts and there made into shoes for a fresh crop of foremast hands to wear out in Monterey, and so on ad infinitum. There appears to be no record of John Steinbeck's ever having piled hides, but he did perform many backbreaking agricultural chores along-side the floating population of field hands. And he read widely and to good purpose. His mother was a schoolteacher, and she apparently held to the principle that pedagogy should begin at home. John's early reading, some and Punishment, Hardy's The Return of the Native, and Milton's Paradise Lost..." According to Wikipedia: "In 1929, George Macy founded the Limited Editions Club and began publishing illustrated books in limited numbers (usually 1500 copies) for subscription members. In 1935 Macy founded the Heritage Club, which together with the Heritage Press, created and distributed more affordable and unlimited reprints of the great books previously published by The Limited Editions Club. Macy was involved personally in the work of the Press, designing many of its publications, including The Grapes of Wrath, The Decameron, Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, and A Shropshire Lad. He also authored The Collected Verses of George Jester (distributed in a limited number as a Macy family holiday greeting) and edited Heritage's A Sailor's Reader and A Soldier's Reader, which were wartime volumes, published in August 1943, of "fo... read more

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