The Sea Wolf (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

LONDON, Jack (intro. Edmund Gilligan; illus. Fletcher Martin). The Sea-Wolf. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1979.

Large Octavo. Full blue leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. [iv], x, 354 pp. Full-colour and black and white illustrations by Fletcher Martin throughout, including colour frontispiece. Collector's Edition. Part of the "100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series. Blue leather variant — the majority of copies were issued in red leather.

Jack London published The Sea-Wolf in 1904, the year after The Call of the Wild, and it became one of his most sustained and philosophically ambitious works. He had been reading Nietzsche, and what he produced was a novel that places a Nietzschean figure at its centre and then interrogates rather than celebrates him — a more complex exercise than it might initially appear from a writer whose reputation for muscular adventure fiction tends to obscure his intellectual seriousness.

The premise is simple. Humphrey Van Weyden, a literary critic of comfortable means and no practical experience of anything, survives a ferry collision in San Francisco Bay and is pulled from the water by the sealing schooner Ghost, commanded by Wolf Larsen. Larsen is everything Van Weyden is not: physically magnificent, intellectually formidable, and entirely without moral sentiment. He reads Milton and Spencer in his cabin between acts of savage discipline, constructs coherent philosophical arguments for a materialist worldview in which the strong consume the weak as a matter of natural law, and operates the Ghost as a floating kingdom of personal will. Van Weyden, forced to work as a cabin boy, is simultaneously appalled, fascinated, and challenged in ways he has never been challenged before.

The novel is partly a critique of the Nietzschean will to power — Larsen's philosophy is presented with genuine force but London ensures that its human cost is never softened — and partly an exploration of what it means to become capable and self-reliant in the face of conditions that cannot be managed by intellect alone. When Maud Brewster, a poet, is also brought aboard the Ghost, and Van Weyden and Larsen both recognise her significance, the novel takes on an additional dimension that London handles with more delicacy than his reputation would suggest. The first printing of forty thousand copies sold out before publication; its immediate success confirmed London as the most widely read American writer of his generation.

The illustrations were produced by Fletcher Martin (1904–1979), the American painter and magazine illustrator who served as a war artist during the Second World War and whose vigorous, painterly style is particularly well-suited to the novel's dramatic seascapes and action. The introduction is by Edmund Gilligan (1898–1973), an American author of sea fiction whose own work gives him particular authority on the subject.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000484