STEINBECK, John.
Once There Was a War.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING. New York: The Viking Press, 1958.
Octavo. xxi, [3], 233 pp. Quarter taupe cloth spine stamped in red over brown paper boards, top edge stained red; in the original first-issue dust jacket, $3.95 price intact and unclipped to the front flap, the jacket illustration by Don Freeman. Goldstone & Payne A37a. Book very good — square and tight, cloth and boards clean, text block crisp and unmarked, the top stain bright, with bumped corner tips and a slight forward lean. Dust jacket good-plus — the spine sunned and toned (lettering dimmed but legible), light edge wear, the front and rear panels bright with colors intact, no chips or tears; in a mylar sleeve.
Steinbeck's collected wartime journalism. From June through December 1943 he filed dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune from England during the Blitz, from North Africa, and from Sicily and Italy — written not from the battle lines but from troopships, London pubs, and behind-the-lines quarters, among paratroopers and bomber crews. He gathered the pieces in 1958 with a new introduction that looks back on the whole project as a kind of fairy tale grown impossibly distant from the atomic-age present.
The Don Freeman dust jacket — Freeman is better known for Corduroy and his New York theater drawings — captures soldiers crowded around a pub table in his loose, affectionate line. A handsome copy; the unclipped $3.95 price on the front flap is the key first-issue point.
SKU TO-2026-009
