The Last Unicorn
New York: The Viking Press, 1968.
First edition, first printing. Association copy signed by Peter S. Beagle on the title page and inscribed to Diane Blackmer and Chuck Kinder: "For Diane, after all these years, finally seeing this book where it belongs... And thank you, Chuck, for still being here. I'd have missed you real bad..."
[vi], 218 pp. Bound in publisher's blue paper-covered boards over black spine cloth with spine lettered in blue, yellow and purple, mauve pink topstain, purple endpapers. Good with slight lean and heavy rubbing to spine lettering, light foxing and toning to boards and textblock edges, and scattered staining to upper edge of textblock and sporadically throughout. In a Good price-clipped tattered dust jacket with staining.
The novelists Chuck Kinder and Peter S. Beagle met at Stanford in the early 1960s.The two men were both Stegner fellows and were part of a literary social circle that included Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey, who was responsible for Beagle's never-repeated experiment with psychedelics. Twenty years later Kinder left California to become a living legend at the University of Pittsburgh, Beagle's alma mater, as he mentioned in a 2014 interview:
"I have a friend whose childhood was exactly the opposite of mine...he lived in horror that his parents might find out that he wrote poetry. In West Virginia, hates football, writes poetry, there’s only one possible conclusion. Today he runs the writing department at the University of Pittsburgh. Where, oddly enough, I went."
Beagle and Kinder remained friends even while their paths diverged. Kinder spent two decades working on a roman a clef that peaked at 3,000 pages, a struggle fictionalized by his student Michael Chabon in the 1995 novel Wonder Boys. The more prolific Beagle stuck with fantasy, writing whimsical but emotionally complex stories while supplementing his income with teaching and screenwriting. His numerous awards include the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus, and he's still writing.
Price: $7,800