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Assembling California
by McPhee, John
- Used
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
- Condition
- See description
- Seller
-
Deep River, Connecticut, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. First Edition. First printing Fine in decorated light green cloth covered boards with gilt text stamping on the spine. An octavo of 8 1/4 by 5 1/2 inches. In a fine dust jacket with the price intact on the front flap. Signed by the author without a date or inscription on the fly title page. 304 pages of text dealing with the geology of California. Illustrated with a frontispiece from a black and white, satellite, photograph of California's Central Valley. A bright, clean and handsome copy with no prior ownership markings of any kind.
Synopsis
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of the country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands. (Goodreads)
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Details
- Bookseller
- Town's End Books
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- TB32747
- Title
- Assembling California
- Author
- McPhee, John
- Book Condition
- Used
- Edition
- First Edition
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus & Giroux
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1993
Terms of Sale
Town's End Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
Town's End Books
Biblio member since 2009
Deep River, Connecticut
About Town's End Books
We purchase and sell only collectible first editions in a number of fields all focused on Americana. We are primarily mail order sellers; however, we are open by appointment and welcome visits from customers.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Title Page
- A page at the front of a book which may contain the title of the book, any subtitles, the authors, contributors, editors, the...
- Gilt
- The decorative application of gold or gold coloring to a portion of a book on the spine, edges of the text block, or an inlay in...
- Octavo
- Another of the terms referring to page or book size, octavo refers to a standard printer's sheet folded four times, producing...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...
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