Books

First Printing. Octavo (21.5cm); white cloth with titles stamped in metallic orange, magenta, blue, and green on the spine; dustjacket; viii,416pp. Larry McMurtry's copy, with his bookplate mounted to the front pastedown, and inscribed to him by Wolfe on the front endpaper: "For Larry McMurtry / These few travel notes about Texas and other points along the tangent / from Tom Wolfe." Spine ends gently nudged, some light hand-soil and a few faint smudges to the cloth, a thin, partial crack to the gutter at half-title, with two dog-eared pages, but otherwise clean internally; unlike every copy we have seen or handled even the faded ones the top edge on this copy appears never to have been dyed blue; Very Good+. Dustjacket is unclipped (priced $5.95), with light wear to extremities, a hint of sunning to the spine, and a thin, faint strip of dustiness along the lower spine on verso; Near Fine. Wolfe's third and most enduring book, a major work of the New Journalism and one of the defining books of the 1960s, in which he recounts his experiences traveling with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, whom he would not have met if not for Larry McMurtry. In 1960, McMurtry was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University's Creative Writing Center, along with Kesey, Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, and others. He and Kesey lived near each other and became close friends and correspondents over the coming years. On p.6 of the book, Wolfe mentions how those letters between McMurtry and Kesey became the genesis of his idea for this book: "One day I happened to get hold of some letters Kesey wrote from Mexico to his friend Larry McMurtry, who wrote Horseman, Pass By, from which the movie Hud was made. They were wild and ironic, written like a cross between William Burroughs and George Ade, telling of hideouts, disguises, paranoia, fleeing from cops, smoking joints and seeking satori in the Rat lands of Mexico." After quoting extensively from those letters, Wolfe mentions having the idea to chase down Kesey in Mexico to do a story on "Young Novelist Real-Life Fugitive;" he ended up finding Kesey at the San Mateo jail, held up on two dope charges. It was there that Kesey began talking "about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch lightning." (p.10). The rest, as they say, is history. McMurtry's friendship with Kesey insured that his Houston, Texas home would be a stopping point of Kesey's famous cross-country trip. He's mentioned twice in Wolfe's notes at the end of the book, and makes a cameo appearance on p.86, chasing after a nude hippie woman, "Stark Naked," who scoops up his young son and starts shrieking after a bad trip. An association copy with serious weight; with the exception of possible copies inscribed by Wolfe to either Kesey or Neal Cassady, we can think of no finer copy.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test chronicles the experiences of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they travel across the United States in a colorful bus, promoting the use of psychedelic drugs.