Cannery Row (first edition in scarcer variant buff binding)
New York: Viking Press, 1945. First edition. Hardcover. First edition. 12mo. hardcover in the scare buff-colored cloth lettered in blue (most copies were bound in canary yellow cloth). 208 pp. Solidly very good, spine strip a bit darkened, vintage bookplate partially present front pastedown. No jacket. Steinbeck's humorous but poignant short novel about "Cannery Row", the area on the shoreline of Monterey (housing fish canneries), California during the Great Depression. The main characters are a group of unemployed mainly homeless but happy-go-lucky men (Mack and the Boys), Doc, an intellectual marine biologist who's laboratory and specimen collection business is located on one of the piers (based on Steinbeck's real life friend ed Ricketts), Dora Flood, the local madam of the bordello at the Bear Flag Restaurant. Steinbeck would publish a sequel, "Sweet Thursday" with the same location (now post-WW2) and most of the characters, in 1954. Very Good. Item #E36965
Price: $275.00