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On The Road

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On The Road

by KEROUAC, JACK

  • Used
  • first
Condition
First Edition. Small erasure on the front free endpaper; a very good copy in a dust jacket with the usual faded spine, and with
Seller
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Newton, Massachusetts, United States
Item Price
NZ$6,756.80
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About This Item

New York: Viking Press, 1957. First Edition. Small erasure on the front free endpaper; a very good copy in a dust jacket with the usual faded spine, and with four tiny tape mends on the blind side.

Synopsis

Perhaps the most famous and influential of the Beat novels, Jack Kerouac's On the Road represents much of what made the Beat and Counterculture movements so unique and important. The plot concerning the road trips and adventures experienced by Kerouac and his friends is well-known, as are the rumors and tall tales of the books' production. Kerouac often claimed that the wrote On the Road in a mere three weeks on a single 120-foot scroll of paper. Although that scroll does indeed exist and is featured in museums, Kerouac kept detailed journals of his travels that would later become passages and chapters in the finished product. The book was first published by Viking in 1957.  Viking Press would go on to publish an edited version of On the Road in 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first printing. They substituted the fictional names for the real Beat protagonists, and they even included some of the more sexually explicit passages that were edited out of the 1957 edition. Due to the cultural significance of the book, true first editions/first printings of On the Road are quite valuable. But be warned: it is easy to mistake reprints or book club editions for the real thing, so always check with an expert before making a significant purchase.

Read More: Identifying first editions of On The Road

Reviews

On Sep 3 2011, West of Eden Books said:
A few years ago, 50 years after its initial publication, and 35 years since I had read it for the first time myself, I loaned my battered paperback copy of On The Road to a young friend of mine who had asked me "What should I read next?". Her reaction was, as I would have hoped, overwhelmingly positive. "It made me want to go hitchhiking" she told me. She didn't go, of course, that's considered too dangerous these days, but she caught the spirit of Kerouac from those yellowed old pages and that made me happy. It made me remember myself from the days before I was twenty. When the world was wide-open in front of me with all my limitless imagination and inexhaustible energy to carry me forward. Those two-and-a-half-hundred pages created in a Benzedrine-fueled typing frenzy spoke to both of us across generations as great writing is meant to do. Jack's tales of Casady, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the rest would continue in his books that followed but the spirit and zest of On The Road stand alone. Bob Dylan said of On The Road, "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's". Myself and my young friend were lucky enough to experience it that same way.

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Details

Bookseller
Peter L. Stern & Company, Inc. US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
34834P
Title
On The Road
Author
KEROUAC, JACK
Book Condition
Used - First Edition. Small erasure on the front free endpaper; a very good copy in a dust jacket with the usual faded spine, and with
Publisher
Viking Press
Place of Publication
New York
Date Published
1957

Terms of Sale

Peter L. Stern & Company, Inc.

Items are returnable for any reason for a full refund. Please inform us within three days of receipt and provide the reason for the return.

About the Seller

Peter L. Stern & Company, Inc.

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2009
Newton, Massachusetts

About Peter L. Stern & Company, Inc.

With more than 35 years experience in the rare book trade, Peter L. Stern and Co., Inc. has established itself as a highly regarded firm of antiquarian booksellers.

Specializing in 19th and 20th century literature, signed and inscribed books, and manuscripts we maintain a high quality inventory. Our shop is located in the heart of Newton Centre where we are open by chance or appointment

In the long-standing tradition of the rare book trade we continue to mail regular catalogues to our customers. We are easily accessible via the MBTA Green Line's D Branch. We travel widely and attend both international and local book fairs.

Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

Jacket
Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
Spine
The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
First Edition
In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...

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