Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$4000.00 + shipping
Condition: Good
Description: 262 Pp. + 3 Pp Ads At Rear. Blue Green Cloth, Decorated In Darker Shades, Gilt Spine Lettering, White Spine Lettering. Teg. First Edition, First Issue, With The Author's Names Omitted Throughout. Publisher's Name On Spine In Letters 3/16" Tall; No Priority Established. This Copy Signed By Jack London On The Title Page In Pencil. Written As A Collaboration Between Jack London And Anna Strunsky. Ms. Strunsky Was An Active Socialist, Was Married To Socialist And Naacp Founder William English Walling, And Was The Aunt Of Leonore Strunsky (Born 1900) Who Was The Late Wife Of Composer Ira Gershwin. Some Wear, Gilt Still Bright, A Few Points Of Fraying At Ends Of Spine, No Fraying To Tips, Lacking Front Free Blank Endpaper. Name Stamps Of A Previous Owner, R. M. Price, On Front And Rear Endpapers.
Seller: Arroyo Seco Books, Pasadena, Member IOBA, Pasadena, CA, U.S.A.
[LONDON, Jack].. The Kempton-Wace Letters. INSCRIBED. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1903., 1903.
Price: US$8500.00 + shipping
Condition: Fine
Description: First edition, first issue, without the author's names on the title page. 8vo. Original gray/blue cloth, with front decoratively stamped in black in an all over floral design and lettered in gilt, t.e.g., others uncut (front hinge a little cracked), else a fine, bright copy. 256 pages. Enclosed in an old worn slipcase. Inscribed by Jack London with a quote from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam on the front free endpaper: "To dear Charles Warren Stoddard* - 'Indeed, indeed, Repentance /oft before / I swore - but was I / sober when I swore?' / Jack London / The Bungalow /June 6, 1903". Issued very early in his career - in fact, in the same year are his now classic "The Call of the Wild" - "The Kempton-Wace Letters" was a collaborative novel consisting of the epistolary discussion of the philosophy of love, written anonymously by Jack London and Anna Strunsky. *Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909), California poet and author of many travel narratives. After journeying to Hawaii and Tahiti, he wrote South-Sea Idylls (1873), Hawaiian Life (1894), and The Lepers of Molokai (1885); Jack London borrowed the last title for an article in Woman's Home Companion, January 1908. From 1889 to 1902 Stoddard was professor of English at the Catholic University of America. As evidenced by London's breezy letters to the older Stoddard, the two appear to have been on quite friendly terms. In one letter from 1900, London - referring to Stoddard's books on the South Seas - writes: "You are responsible. You have sown the seeds of unrest in me."
Seller: Houle Rare Books/Autographs/ABAA/PADA, Palm Springs, CA, U.S.A.