The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings of the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century

(Norfolk, CT): New Directions, 1960. First Edition. Hardcover. Near fine/near fine. Octavo, 81pp. A crisp, clean copy, near fine, with just a hint of foxing to the fore-edge, and to the beige cloth. In a near fine dust jacket with gentle rubbing to the extremities, but no significant tears or chips. A marvelous copy, SIGNED and INSCRIBED by Merton on the front free endpaper to Joan Baez and Ira Sandperl: "For Joan & Ira. Merry Christmas. Tom." Michael Mott, in his biography of Merton, "The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton," writes in some detail about the meeting between Baez, Sandperl (her co-founder of the Institute for the Study of Non-violence), and Merton at Gethsemani. Baez and Sandperl had stopped to meet Merton on their way to Atlanta to meet with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC. The two were hoping to convince King to expand his efforts beyond Civil Rights and to engage more with the Vietnam War and global humanitarian struggles. Mott writes that Baez and Sandperl arrived on December 8th at Gethsemani, where they "spent time with Merton talking and drinking beer in the fields near the tobacco barn [...] later they got into a discussion about the lyrics of other songs of the sixties. This became quite heated when Merton found himself defending some of his favorite songs against the charge by Joan Baez that many contained hidden, and sometimes explicit, violence." Despite their sometimes heated discussions, all three were moved and affected by the encounter. They all corresponded for some time after the visit, and Sandperl in particular kept Merton abreast of his activities promoting non-violence around the world. Baez herself was awarted the Merton Award by the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Justice in 1975. As such, an extraordinary copy of one of Merton's scarcer volumes, which brings together three important 20th century figures in peace activisim. (See Mott, pp. 463-4, and Spencer, Thomas: Joan Baez, Ira Sandperl, and Thomas Merton's Non-Violent Activism (an article available on merton.org, written by an Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University, South Bend).