STEINBECK, John.
Always Something to Do in Salinas.
LIMITED EDITION, ONE OF 300 — THIS COPY #28. Bradenton, Florida: Opuscula Press, 1986.
First separate printing in book form, limited to 300 hand-bound numbered copies, this being copy #28. Octavo. 19 pp. Frontispiece photographic portrait of Steinbeck by Paul Farber. Edited and introduced by Robert F. Hanson, September 1986. Dark brown buckram spine over brown cloth boards, with a cream paper title label to the front cover; without dust jacket as issued. ISBN 0-912109-10-6. Goldstone & Payne C120 (for the 1955 Holiday original). A fine copy.
The first separate book-form appearance of Steinbeck's Holiday magazine essay on his birthplace, published in June 1955 as part of the magazine's series in which American writers reflected on the towns of their childhood. Steinbeck had finished East of Eden three years earlier, and the essay carries the same complicated feeling for Salinas that runs through the novel — fond, exact, and unsparing at once. He summons the Salinas of his own boyhood in the 1900s and 1910s and traces the town forward into the post-war agricultural city.
Opuscula Press, a small Florida imprint that reissued fugitive Steinbeck material, produced this hand-bound edition "as a service to Steinbeck collectors." It remains one of the more attractive small-press Steinbeck productions, uncommon on the market and sought by collectors building deep California shelves.
SKU TO-2026-035
