LONDON, Jack.
The Cruise of the Snark.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911.
Octavo. xiv, 340 pp, plus 4 pp of publisher's advertisements. One of 4,265 copies of the first printing ("Published June, 1911" on the copyright page, no later printings indicated). Original blue-green ribbed cloth with a color pictorial paste-down label of the Snark to the front board, gilt-lettered spine, top edge gilt. Color frontispiece and more than one hundred half-tone photographs throughout. As in all known copies, the title page is tipped in, and an extra plate is inserted between pp. 270–271 without appearing in the list of illustrations. BAL 11929; Sisson & Martens p. 57. Very good: the front hinge slightly cracked but the binding firm; a small scratch to the top of the front-board label, the image of the Snark otherwise clean and intact; internally fresh with no foxing, all plates intact.
London's account of the voyage that nearly killed him. In 1907, at the height of his fame, he commissioned a forty-three-foot boat he named the Snark and set out from Oakland with his wife Charmian and a small crew, meaning to sail around the world over seven years. The vessel was poorly built — it leaked, the engines failed, the bowsprit broke — and London contracted a succession of tropical illnesses that by the end left him barely able to use his hands. The voyage was abandoned at Sydney after roughly two years, scarcely a third of the planned route.
The Cruise of the Snark is what he made of it: a sequence of essays on Hawaii, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, the Solomons, and the New Hebrides, closing with his account of being defeated by his own body. The book is dedicated to Charmian, "the mate of the Snark, who took the wheel … in every emergency."
SKU TO-2026-008
