Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. Peter Parnall. First edition, signed association copy. Hardcover. SIGNED. 269 pp. [22 cm]; full brown cloth with white and brown stamped spine. Illustrated dust jacket. The spine ends are gently bumped. The book is tightly and squarely bound. In a very attractive dust jacket, with light edge-wear, which includes a very short closed tear to the top edge of the rear panel. Very good + / very good. Item #62011
Drawings and jacket design by Peter Parnall. The author's fourth book and first work of nonfiction. Five thousand copies of the first edition were printed. It has now gone on to sell over two million copies taking its rightful place alongside Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as a classic of environmental and wilderness literature.
This copy is inscribed by Edward Abbey to Ernie Bulow, bookman, publisher, and friend of the author, on the front free endpaper.
After receiving an English degree in the sixties, Bulow worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, resided in Gallup, N.M., and taught English at Fort Wingate on the Navajo Reservation. Subsequently, he received a doctorate from the University of Utah, and he returned to Gallup, where he traded in Indian jewelry and kachinas and opened his bookstore.
Edward Abbey and Bulow began their friendship in 1970 at the University of Utah, where Bulow was a graduate student, and Abbey was a visiting professor. It was Bulow that managed to publish Ed's essay "Science with a Human Face" in the University of Utah literary magazine "Wasatch Front." This essay was later included in "The Journey Home." It is also significant to note that Bulow was a featured character in Edward Abbey's novel "The Fool's Progress."
Price: $2,500.00