Love of Life and Other Stories
New York: Published for the Review of Reviews Company by the Macmillan Company, 1913.
Authorized Edition, fourth printing. Presentation copy signed by Jack London on the front free endpaper and inscribed to his physician Dr. A.R. Goodman, the latter's bookplate to front pastedown: "Dear Doctor Goodman: – Some day, when next we meet, I am going to tell you a very shameless thing of which I was guilty when I lay on my back in Vera Cruz. Glen Ellen, Calif., July 10, 1914."
[vi], 265 pp. Bound in publisher's bead-grain blue cloth stamped in blind and lettered in gilt, top edge gilt. Near Fine with slight lean to spine and bowing to rear board, light rubbing to extremities, and light toning to contents; cloth and gilt bright.
A crisp inscribed copy of an early reprint of Jack London’s collection of short stories set in Alaska. The Review of Reviews was a reform magazine, sister to the progressive British periodical of the same name, and a natural choice to publish affordable editions of books by the socialist champion. That champion took a warm interest in the Mexican Revolution and traveled to Mexico in 1914 as a war correspondent for Collier’s. Charmian London wrote in her 1921 biography of her husband that he was stricken with dysentery in Vera Cruz and was treated by Dr. Goodman, the resident American physician. This book was one of a set London sent to the doctor after returning to California. Each book had a different inscription, and this one sparks the imagination.
Price: $3,800