HILLER, Peter.
The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West.
SIGNED HORS DE COMMERCE COPY "E" OF TWENTY. San Francisco: Book Club of California, 2019.
Book Club of California Publication No. 238. First edition, hors de commerce copy lettered "E" — one of 20 lettered copies issued alongside the 50-copy numbered deluxe edition (which adds a portfolio of two Mora cartes) and the 295-copy numbered trade edition. Signed by Peter Hiller, editor Gail Jones, and printer Norman Clayton on the colophon. Afterword by Gary F. Kurutz. Large quarto, 9 × 12¼ inches, 192 pp. Color and black-and-white photographic illustrations throughout. Designed and letterpress printed by Norman Clayton of Classic Letterpress, Ojai, with Molly Dedmond; hand-bound by Klaus Rötzscher of Pettingell Book Bindery, Berkeley. Quarter linen spine over brown paper-covered boards, with a mounted photographic portrait of Mora on the upper board; in the brown cloth publisher's slipcase. Publisher's prospectus with order sheet laid in. Fine, as new.
The first full-length biography of Joseph Jacinto Mora (1876–1947), the Uruguayan-born artist who reached California in 1900, lived among the Hopi in Arizona, rode the ranges of the American West, and settled on the Monterey Peninsula as the most prolific and various Western artist of his generation. From his Pebble Beach studio Mora produced the Serra Cenotaph at the Carmel Mission, the design of the 1925 California Diamond Jubilee half-dollar, murals and architectural sculpture across the West, his celebrated pictorial maps — cartes, as he called them — of California, the missions, and the Seventeen Mile Drive, and decades of illustration. Peter Hiller, curator of the Jo Mora Trust and the foremost authority on the artist, drew on Mora's own diaries, journals, and letters — much of it published here for the first time. The Book Club's 238th publication was oversubscribed on release, and copies in any issue have been uncommon since.
SKU TO-2026-028
