James Cummins Bookseller

New York: 1909.

Price: $2,500.00

About the item

[2], 310 numbered leaves, typed recto only. Holograph corrections. With a frontispiece photograph by Beach signed and inscribed by Curtis Cooksey, depicting him in the lead role in the 1920 film adaptation. 1 vols. 4to. Author's Original Corrected Typescript. Half red morocco and red cloth, spine gilt, red cloth endpapers, t.e.g.

Item #322890

[WITH:] The Silver Horde. Frontispiece. 390pp. 8vo. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1909. First edition. Publisher's pictorial cloth. Front hinge starting. Later slipcase

In 1900, Florida-born Rex Beach came to Alaska during the gold rush, where after five years of unsuccessful prospecting he turned to writing, largely in the adventure style of Jack London. His two best known novels, The Spoilers (1906) and The Silver Horde (1909), are both set in Alaska. The Silver Horde is set in Kalvik, a fictionalized community in Bristol Bay, Alaska, and tells the story of a down on his luck gold miner who discovers a greater wealth in Alaska's run of salmon and decides to open a cannery. To accomplish this he must overcome the relentless opposition of the "salmon trust," a fictionalized Alaska Packers' Association, which undercuts his financing, sabotages his equipment, incites a longshoremen's riot and bribes his fishermen to quit. The story line includes a love interest as the protagonist is forced to choose between his fiance, a spoiled banker's daughter, and an earnest roadhouse operator, a woman of "questionable virtue." The Silver Horde was twice made into a film, first as a silent film in 1920 starring Curtis Cooksey (whose inscribed photograph is here mounted as a frontispiece) and again in 1930 as a talkie.

The typescript was sold in the 1934 sale of the library of Crosby Gaige, a noted theatrical producer and director who worked with the Selwyn Brothers at Goldwyn Pictures, a precursor to MGM.