Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Steinbeck, John.. Sea of Cortez.. Viking, 1941.
Price: US$4200.00 + shipping
Condition: Near Fine
Description: A Near Fine copy in a Very Good plus price-clipped dust jacket with light wear to the folds and extremities and shallow chipping to the head of the spine. Steinbeck's signed note laid in. In 1940, John Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts sailed out of Monterey Bay to the Sea of Cortez. Shifting his focus from fiction to science, Steinbeck wrote that his new work "must jump to include other species beside the human. This is why my interest in biology and ecology have become so sharpened." The account that Steinbeck wrote about the expedition includes Ricketts's catalogue of marine invertebrates found in Baja.
Seller: Gregor Rare Books, Langley, WA, U.S.A.
Price: US$5000.00 + shipping
Description: First edition of this classic work. Octavo, original cloth, cartographic endpapers. Presentation copy, inscribed by John Steinbeck on the title page. Some offsetting to the half-title page, near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket design by W.V. Eckhardt. The collaboration of two friendsâ"one a novelist, one a marine biologistâ"produced a volume in which fascinating popular science is woven into a narrative of manâs dreams, his ideals, and his accomplishments through the centuries. Sea of Cortez is one of those rare books that are all things to all readers. Actually the record of a brief collecting expedition in the lonely Gulf of California, it will be science to the scientist, philosophy to the philosopher, and to the average man an adventure in living and thinking. The teeming and wildly competitive world of the sand flats is seen in terms of history, politics, ethics, and sociology; a starfish is important, not only because it is a new variety, but because it is essential to the delicate balance of the whole region in which it is found. Steinbeck and Ricketts are the opposite of âpureâ scientists: it is not only their work that fascinates them, but the complicated and enormously exciting implications of that work.
Seller: Raptis Rare Books, Palm Beach, FL, U.S.A.
Price: US$7995.00 + shipping
Condition: Very Good
Description: In blue and red jacket over green cloth with silver titling, 8vo, 598pp. Illustrated with color and b/w illustrations. A wonderful copy inscribed to long-lived Irish rabble-rowser Sheila O'Leary on the half title page by Steinbeck: "For Sheila O'leary - O'leary - O'leary - For Sheila O'leary. - John Steinbeck". (slight edgewear to outer jacket at tips and corners, slight toning to edges and endpapers). Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾"
Seller: Vashon Island Books, Vashon, WA, U.S.A.