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On the Road

On the Road

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On the Road

by Jack Kerouac

  • Used
  • Hardcover
  • first
Condition
See description
Seller
Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
Item Price
£10,037.50
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About This Item

1957: Viking Press. First Edition . First Edition/First Printing. Hardcover. Fine book in a near fine Dust Jacket, with slight wear. Jacket priced at $3.95. Bright unrubbed copy and the cornerstone of Beat literature. Uncommon in this condition. Housed in a clamshell case.

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
MDS Books CA (CA)
Bookseller's Inventory #
000888
Title
On the Road
Author
Jack Kerouac
Book Condition
Used
Quantity Available
1
Edition
First Edition
Binding
Hardcover
Publisher
Viking Press
Place of Publication
1957

Terms of Sale

MDS Books

30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.

About the Seller

MDS Books

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 5 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2013
Mississauga, Ontario

About MDS Books

Modern First Editions, Fiction, Poetry.

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...
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...
Fine
A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...

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