STERLING, George.
Sails and Mirage and Other Poems.
FIRST EDITION. San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1921.
12mo. 119 pp. Green cloth elaborately blind-stamped with a spider-web design, titled in gilt; in the original browned glassine dust wrapper, itself printed with a spider-web design. A fine copy, with the tiniest foxing to the fore-edge, the fragile glassine with shallow chipping to the edges. BAL 18797; Mattila A25.
George Sterling (1869–1926) was the central figure of California's literary world in the first quarter of the twentieth century — a presiding poet of the San Francisco bohemia and the founder, at Carmel-by-the-Sea, of the artists' and writers' colony that drew Jack London, Mary Austin, and a generation of West Coast writers. Sails and Mirage gathers the poems of his maturity, among them "Spring in Carmel" and "The Passing of Bierce," his elegy for his mentor Ambrose Bierce.
The volume is dedicated to Albert M. Bender, the San Francisco insurance broker, art patron, and book collector who was one of the most important supporters of the arts in California in this period. The original glassine wrapper is the uncommon feature here: fragile by nature, it has been lost from the great majority of surviving copies of Robertson's Sterling first editions. To find one present, with its spider-web design intact and the book itself fine, is unusual.
SKU TO-2026-092
