Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968. First edition. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Peter Parnall. 269pp. Octavo [21.5 cm] Brown cloth. Illustrated. Spine ends gently bruised. A few tiny scuffs to extremities. Small bookstore sticker at head of front flap. Blind ownership embossment in lower right corner of title page. In a dust jacket, with subtle rubbing and chipping to the extremities. Signed holographic letter from Abbey laid in. Eight lines of text in blue ink and signed Ed A. 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 sell almost two million copies taking 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 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