The Diary of a Forty-Niner

Stanford: James Ladd Delkin, 1947 Book. Very fine. Hardcover. "California Centennial Edition." With an excellent historical introduction by Oscar Lewis. Small octavo. xxiii, [3], 192pp. Frontis map. Brown cloth. A fine copy with lightly worn dust jacket (chipping to head of jacket spine). Lewis gives a fascinating account of the publication history of the book and how fires in San Francisco in 1906 and New York in 1908 nearly destroyed the entire edition of the first printing of 1906. Of that first edition, two thousand copies were printed of which 1,200 were burned. As Wheat points out, "Fiction, but of notable quality as a depiction of Gold Rush life and times." The 49er was Alfred T. Jackson, a Connecticut man who spent two years in the California mines at Nevada County. [Kurutz: 114c; Rocq: 5977; see Wheat: 34]..