The Collected Library

4to. Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton. Original rawhide backstrip over “grass cloth” boards (rubbing); original slipcase (rubbing, minor losses along edges). Laid-in is a publisher’s small broadside, “About the binding of this book,” in which they give advice on how to care for this binding. Provenance: Donald E. Petersen (1926-2024), American businessman and former CEO of the Ford Motor Company (ownership blind stamp).

LIMITED EDITION, number 72 of 1,146 copies. The publisher’s idea to use rawhide as a binding material was “planned to be more than serviceable, it is planned to give the prospective reader an emotional sympathy for the novel before he begins to read it.” The grass cloth was used to “put the prospective reader in mind of the parched, sun-baked grass of the Dust Bowl.” Silver was used, rather than gold, for the stamping of the title because “this is a novel about people in the silver country.”