STEINBECK, John

Sweet Thursday

New York: The Viking Press, 1954. Item #06587

Return to Cannery Row - Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday
First Edition - Near Fine in Second-Issue Dust Jacket

STEINBECK, John. Sweet Thursday. New York: The Viking Press, 1954.

First edition, first printing. Octavo (8 x 5 3/8 inches; 203 x 136 mm.). x, [1–2], 3–273, [3, blank] pp. Title-page printed in red and black.

Publisher’s yellow linen over boards, front cover and spine stamped in blue and lettered in red, top edge stained red, slightly sunned. In the original color pictorial dust jacket, price-clipped, with minimal rubbing to extremities. A near fine copy in a near fine second-issue dust jacket, with review comments printed beneath the photograph on the rear panel.

A warmly nostalgic return to the Monterey setting of Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday reunites Doc and a cast of eccentric and endearing characters in a postwar landscape tinged with both humor and quiet melancholy. Though lighter in tone than Steinbeck’s earlier works, the novel retains his characteristic sympathy for outsiders and his keen sense of place.

While the book itself is a straightforward first edition, copies are often encountered with later or variant dust jackets. The present example retains the second-issue jacket, identifiable by the addition of review blurbs beneath the author photograph on the rear panel - a point of interest to collectors, though less preferred than the first-issue jacket.

A clean, attractive copy of a late Steinbeck first, increasingly sought in collectible condition.

Goldstone & Payne A34a.

Price: $375.00