Jack London THE CALL OF THE WILD 1903 MacMillan 1st Edition; 1st Printing
Item History & Price
Jack London THECALL OF THE WILD 1903 MacMillan 1st edition; 1st Printing Description:Jack London THE CALL OF THE WILD 1903 MacMillan Co., NY First Edition, firstprinting, Illustrated in color by Philip R. Goodwin and Charles LivingstonBull, and with decorations by Chas. Edw. Hooper.Size is 8 x 5 1/2 inches; 231, [1, blank], [2, ads] pages with frontispiece and ten color plates, included in pagination. 18 textillustrations some printed in blue and some in color. Tissue-guard present onf...rontis. Title-page printed in blue and black. Original vertically ribbed greencloth, front cover and spine decoratively stamped in white, red, black, and gilt.Top edge gilt. Pictorial endpapers, printed in blue with dog-team and mountainscene. Cloth rubbed along extremities, along top and bottom of spine; cornersare bumped. Cover is stamped very brightly in gilt lettering on the frontboards and on the spine. Color of white snow on cover is fading. Occasionalmild spotting throughout but a couple dark spots at binding edges of pages41-46. Ownership name is in ink on 2nd page “Library of D. Winter” withsignature of Dwight Winter 01. Otherwise, a good copy of this scarce firstedition. See photos. "Thebook, illustrating London's recurrent Darwinian theme of the need foradaptation to survive was an immediate success and thrust London into aposition of unaccustomed wealth." (Benét's Reader's Encyclopedia) “The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novelby Jack London published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada during the 1890sKlondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The centralcharacter of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in SantaClara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold intoservice as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harshenvironment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. Bythe end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinctand learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. London spent almost ayear in the Yukon collecting material for the book. The story was serialized inthe Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and was published a month laterin book form. The book s great popularity and success made a reputation forLondon. As early as 1923, the story was adapted to film, and it has since seenseveral more cinematic adaptations. (Wikipedia) John Griffith "Jack" London (born JohnGriffith Chaney, 1876 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and socialactivist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazinefiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrityand a large fortune from his fiction alone, including science fiction. Some ofhis most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set inthe Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build aFire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life".He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls ofParlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area inThe Sea Wolf. London was part of the radical literary group "TheCrowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealingwith these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fictionexposés The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. (Wikipedia)
