Description
Oregon State University Press, Published 1992. Hardcover, vi, 313 pp.; 23 cm; Northwest Reprints series; illustrated with black-and-white photographs and a map. Edited and introduced by Brian Booth.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
112
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Green cloth boards lettered in gilt on front board and spine; mild surface and edge wear. Binding tight. Speckled green endpapers. Pages clean and unmarked. Pictorial dust jacket, green with black-and-white photograph of Holbrook on front panel and review excerpts on rear panel; mild shelf wear, a few faint scuffs along top edge of front panel. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Anthology of two dozen pieces by Stewart H. Holbrook (1893-1964), logger turned Oregonian columnist and author of Holy Old Mackinaw, who called his own work "lowbrow" history. Drawn from The American Mercury, Esquire, The New Yorker, American Heritage and his Macmillan books of the 1930s through 1950s, the pieces cover logging camps, Wobblies, skid roads, forest fires and Northwest eccentrics: the Corvallis prophet Joshua II (Franz Edmund Creffield), Bunco Kelly and the Portland crimps, the Tillamook Burn, the Aurora communists, outlaw Harry Tracy, and Arthur Boose, the last Wobbly paper boy. Booth's 40-page biographical introduction draws on family photographs and the Holbrook papers at the University of Washington; the book ends with a checklist of Holbrook's books. Booth founded the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts and the Oregon Book Awards; Portland Magazine named this collection one of the "20 Greatest Oregon Books Ever." Contents: An Introduction to Stewart Holbrook; Death and Times of a Prophet; Daylight in the Swamp; The Affair at Copperfield; Cargoes of Maidens; Anarchists at Home; The Wildest Man of the West; Fire in the Bush; The Three Sirens of Portland; The Cattle King; The Original Nature Man; The Wobblies Come; The Great Tillamook Fire; Saloon in the Timber; Bunco Kelly, King of the Crimps; Opal the Understanding Heart; The Legend of Jim Hill; Erickson's: Elbow Bending for Giants; The Gorse of Bandon; Whistle Punks; Harry Tracy: "King of Western Robbers"; Disaster in June; The Aurora Communists; First Bomb; The Great Homestead Murders; Lumberjacks' Saturday Night; The Last of the Wobblies; Additional Reading; Editor's Note; Acknowledgments.