Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. First edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. Peter Parnall. 269pp. Octavo [22 cm] Brown cloth over boards, with title stamped in white and beige on spine. The spine is a hair rolled, and there are a couple of small, light moisture stains along the bottom edge of the rear board. The larger moisture stain measures roughly 1 inch wide by 1 inch deep. There is a gift inscription, dated "1968," on the front free endpaper. In a dust jacket, with light rubbing, and small closed and open tears to the edges. The author's fourth book and his first work of nonfiction. This collection of meditations by then park ranger Abbey in what was Arches National Monument of the 1950s was quietly published in the raucous sixties in a first edition of 5,000 copies and has now gone on to take its rightful place alongside Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as an environmental and wilderness classic. The late author's reflections transcend the mere genre of the environmental essay; the individual pieces form part of a fully realized whole that defined a whole new style of environmental and wilderness writing, inspiring new generations of writers (Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams come to mind) while becoming the author's best known and best loved work in the process, and yes, becoming what Abbey always feared, "a classic