Books

First edition, first printing, in the scarce jacket. This beautifully illustrated children's literature classic was famously acclaimed by the American poet Carl Sandburg as "the greatest dog story ever written and at the same time a study of one of the most curious and profound motives that play hide-and-seek in the human soul" (quoted in Kingman, p. 116). Set in the Klondike Gold Rush, the book was inspired by Egerton Ryerson Young's My Dogs in the Northland, published the previous year. The Call of the Wild is "a human allegory concealed within the dog's life and death struggle to adapt to a hostile environment. The allegory was purely unintentional but not accidental. London's experience with the people in the slums of England set him thinking of the contrast between them and the clean, beautiful, but primitive world of the North. These thoughts, coupled with the memories of his own background and his superb philosophical knowledge, made the allegory inevitable. It was a book that wrote itself. Jack's unusual power of observation and his unsurpassed ability to describe what he saw made him one of America's leading storytellers" (Kingman, p. 116). It was serialized in The Saturday Post from June to July 1903. Octavo. Original green vertically ribbed cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt and decorated with red, white, and black designs, pale blue illustrated endpapers, top edge gilt. Colour frontispiece, with tissue guard, 10 plates, illustrated title page printed in black and blue. Light rubbing to cloth at extremities; jacket spine lightly toned, chips and short closed tears to extremities, split to front joint and across centre of spine panel repaired with archival tissue to verso, flaps without price as issued: a fine copy in very good dust jacket. Woodbridge 19. Russ Kingman, A Pictorial Life of Jack London, 1979.

Published in 1903, The Call of the Wild is a novel by Jack London. The story is set during the Klondike Gold Rush and follows a domesticated dog named Buck, who is stolen from his home and sold into the brutal life of an Alaskan sled dog.