The Viking Press, 1979. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Good/Good. First edition, 1979. Ex-library. Red cloth boards, mostly minor rubbing to extremities; bottom corners and foot of spine show a little more wear. Minor water damage to lower corner of front board; red dye from cloth bleeds onto front pastedown. Library stamp on text block edges; library pocket on rear free endpaper. Minor wear and handling to dust jacket; tiny bit of waviness to panels; spine panel sun faded; jacket in fresh mylar protector. Happy to send pics. 8vo - over 7¾ - 9¾" tall.

Synopsis

Perhaps the most famous and influential of the Beat novels, Jack Kerouac's On the Road represents much of what made the Beat and Counterculture movements so unique and important. The plot concerning the road trips and adventures experienced by Kerouac and his friends is well-known, as are the rumors and tall tales of the books' production. Kerouac often claimed that the wrote On the Road in a mere three weeks on a single 120-foot scroll of paper. Although that scroll does indeed exist and is featured in museums, Kerouac kept detailed journals of his travels that would later become passages and chapters in the finished product. The book was first published by Viking in 1957. Viking Press would go on to publish an edited version of On the Road in 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first printing. They substituted the fictional names for the real Beat protagonists, and they even included some of the more sexually explicit passages that were edited out of the 1957 edition. Due to the cultural significance of the book, true first editions/first printings of On the Road are quite valuable. But be warned: it is easy to mistake reprints or book club editions for the real thing, so always check with an expert before making a significant purchase.

Reviews

On Sep 3 2011, West of Eden Books said:

A few years ago, 50 years after its initial publication, and 35 years since I had read it for the first time myself, I loaned my battered paperback copy of On The Road to a young friend of mine who had asked me "What should I read next?". Her reaction was, as I would have hoped, overwhelmingly positive. "It made me want to go hitchhiking" she told me. She didn't go, of course, that's considered too dangerous these days, but she caught the spirit of Kerouac from those yellowed old pages and that made me happy. It made me remember myself from the days before I was twenty. When the world was wide-open in front of me with all my limitless imagination and inexhaustible energy to carry me forward. Those two-and-a-half-hundred pages created in a Benzedrine-fueled typing frenzy spoke to both of us across generations as great writing is meant to do. Jack's tales of Casady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest would continue in his books that followed but the spirit and zest of On The Road stand alone. Bob Dylan said of On The Road, "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's". Myself and my young friend were lucky enough to experience it that same way.

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Details

Seller: Twice Sold Tales, Capitol Hill (US)
Seller's Inventory #: 044329
Title: On the Road (Viking Critical Library)
Author: Kerouac, Jack
Format/Binding: Hardcover
Book Condition: Used - Good
Jacket Condition: Good
Quantity Available: 1
Edition: 1st Edition
ISBN 10: 0670525138
ISBN 13: 9780670525133
Publisher: The Viking Press
Place of Publication: New York, Ny
Date Published: 1979

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Twice Sold Tales, Capitol Hill

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Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

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...
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....
Rubbing: Abrasion or wear to the surface. Usually used in reference to a book's boards or dust-jacket.
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...
Text Block: Most simply the inside pages of a book. More precisely, the block of paper formed by the cut and stacked pages of a book....