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ON THE ROAD

ON THE ROAD

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ON THE ROAD: first British in dj

by Kerouac, Jack

  • Used
  • first
Condition
See description
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Seller rating:
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£963.60
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About This Item

A very good first edition in dust jacket

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
VAGABOND BOOKS US (US)
Bookseller's Inventory #
vbf 139
Title
ON THE ROAD
Author
Kerouac, Jack
Book Condition
Used
Quantity Available
1
Edition
First
Publisher
Andre Deutsch
Place of Publication
London
Date Published
1958
Weight
0.00 lbs

Terms of Sale

VAGABOND BOOKS

CWO. returns accepted within 7 days in same condition.

About the Seller

VAGABOND BOOKS

Seller rating:
This seller has earned a 2 of 5 Stars rating from Biblio customers.
Biblio member since 2009
PASADENA, California

About VAGABOND BOOKS

We are an out of print bookstore. We are celebrating our 45th year in the out of print/antiquarian book business. Please search or browse our inventory of hard to find, out of print, used, and rare books. If you can't find what you like please call us at 310 936-5249We have over 50,000 books on subjects ranging from FIRST EDITIONS, ART, MYSTERIES, POETRY, MUSIC, SCIENCE FICTION, LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM TO MILITARY HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY AND GENERAL HISTORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY. We are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, the American Booksellers Association and the International Booksellers Association. We have been in business since 1975.

Glossary

Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:

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...
Jacket
Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...

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