Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumberjack (signed)
NY: Macmillan Company, 1938. First edition. Hardcover. Signed on the title page. His first book, uncommon signed in the first printing. Holbrook first worked in logging in the Northeast before he began to write about timber (first for The Lumber News) and then left to become a freelance journalist full-time, arriving at national prominence and eventually moving to Portland where he became a celebrated Northwest writer (see his New York Times obit and this Oregon Cultural Heritage article). During World War II he was the director of the anti-fire program for the Washington State Forestry Division. As Holbrook writes in his short foreword, "Because they have been so scurvily ignored by academic historians and because we shall probably never see their like again, I have tired to set down an honest picture of the American lumberjack, at work and at play, as he has performed for the past three centuries." His focus is on the "timbered North," rather than the South. A mackinaw is the plaid shirt worn by loggers, originally derived from an Ojibwe word meaning "a large turtle." Gray-beige buckram. Endpapers illustrated in green with logging scenes and maps of the Northwest, Great Lakes, and Maine. A very good or better copy in with mainly some light bumping to spine ends. With the "ex Libris" bookplate of The Pacific Union Club of San Francisco on the pastedown and a later "From the library of" bookplate at the top of the front free endpaper. Discrete erasure marks on the copyright page where there were pencil Pacific Union Club library notations, but not ex-library in the usual sense. In a good only jacket with large chips/loss to both spine ends, another chip to the top of the rear panel, but the panels present well and a jacket at all is uncommon itself. Very good / Good. Item #1689
Price: $375.00 save 5% $356.25