first edition Hardcover
1903 · Boston and New York
by Austin, Mary
Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903. First edition. Hardcover. Good +. 280pp. Large octavo [22 cm] Olive green cloth over boards, with gilt stamped titles on the backstrip and front board, and pictorial stamping in gray, green, and black on the front board. Top edge gilt. Frontispiece illustration plus 3 full-page illustrations and many charming illustrations in the margins of the pages by E. Boyd Smith. 1" split in the cloth along the front joint at the head of the spine; hinges a little soft; rear endpaper cracked along the hinge; text block cracked a few times; a handful of pages with brief markings or marginalia. Mary Austin's first and most popular book, which launched her reoccurring literary theme of the desert lands of California and has gone on to become a classic of the American Southwest. "The Land of Little Rain" is a collection of 14 interrelated sketches describing the region's climate, plants, animals, and people (the Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone tribes, as well as the European-American gold prospectors and borax miners, and descendants of the Hispanic settlers). (Inventory #: 66934)