Books

First Modern Library and twenty-fifth anniversary edition, first printing. Signed by Hunter S. Thompson and inscribed on the half-title, "Dear Selma, Thank you for all your help - Jim says I can't write anything else. Love, HST, Hunter." The recipient was the New York book publicist Selma Shapiro, the wife of Thompson's editor, Jim Silberman. Despite Jim's oversight, Thompson has sneakily drawn a swastika in a heart on the title page of this copy. Silberman published Thompson's first book Hell's Angels in 1967, and spent the next few years trying to coax another book out of his erratic author. His encouragement, advice, and criticism of Thompson's work-in-progress, tentatively titled "The Death of the American Dream" and eventually published as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is collected in Douglas Brinkley's Fear and Loathing in America (2000). Remarking on Thompson's writing practices, Silberman famously said "Your method of research is to tie yourself to a railroad track when you know a train is coming to it and see what happens." This copy has the posthumous bookplate of Silberman and Shapiro loosely inserted. Bound in publisher's original grey cloth with spine lettered in gilt and upper board with publisher's colophon stamped in blind. Near Fine with a shallow strip of sunning to cloth at top and bottom edges, in a Near Fine unclipped dust jacket with a light crease to the rear flap near the fold. A lovely copy with a fantastic association.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the best chronicle of drug-soaked, addle-brained, rollicking good times ever committed to the printed page. It is also the tale of a long weekend road trip that has gone down in the annals of American pop culture as one of the strangest journeys ever undertaken.