CALIFORNIA The Land of the Sun [SOLD]

CALIFORNIA The Land of the Sun

Painted by Sutton Palmer, Described by Mary Austin

Co-published by The Macmillan Company, New York

and Adam and Charles Black, London, England

Hardback, first edition 1914.  Green decorative cloth boards with gilt title block.  Top edge of the pages is gilt. There are 32 tipped-in color illustrations with captioned tissue guard, a fold out map at back, and 178 pages. Only 3000 copies were printed in 1914.  Good condition with moderate shelf wear to cloth edges, no previous owner’s markings or names.  Very scarce book in the first edition.  There are two of these listed on-line, one at $435 and one at $525, certainly an indication of the rarity.

This is a look at California in the early 1900s, written with such elegance by Mary Austin, and images painted by Sutton Palmer.  His 32 paintings are postcard size images, each tipped in on a page with a tissue guard page.  Austin’s descriptions of California are wonderful prose. One can see the landscape in clarity from her writings.  This is a rare book to be enjoyed by anyone interested in California, and what it was like in the very early twentieth century.