Fine Books and Manuscripts

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath, [signed by Thomas Hart Benton]. New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1940. Limited to 1,146 copies, this being No. 494 JIC. Signed by Benton on colophon. Original rawhide backstrip over “grass cloth” boards, covers pictorially stamped, spines titled in silver, illustrated endpapers, housed in original slipcase. Illustrated with lithographs by Benton. Laid-in is a publisher’s small broadside, “About the binding of this book,” in which they give advice on how to care for this binding. Tall 8vos. Slight separation and chipping to slipcase; a fine set rarely seen at auction in this condition. The publisher’s idea to use rawhide as a binding material was “planned to be more than serviceable, it is planned to give the prospective reader an emotional sympathy for the novel before he begins to read it.” The grass cloth was used to “put the prospective reader in mind of the parched, sun-baked grass of the Dust Bowl.” Silver was used, rather than gold, for the stamping of the title because “this is a novel about people in the silver country.”