John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. First Edition. 8vo. 459 pp. Several pages uncut. Index. 9 illustrated plates from photographs and drawings (including frontispiece portrait of John Muir). Tipped in are two photographs (affixed), the Dassonville portrait of John Muir and a drawing of a tree by Muir from his first journal. Underneath the portrait are written two names - Neal M. Muir and John C. Muir. Laid in is an original photograph of a young man; Neil Muir is written on the verso. A heartfelt inscription is written inside front cover to "Fitch" from "Haswell". Tan cloth in illustrated dustjacket. A near fine copy in near fine dustjacket (price-clipped; minor wear to spine ends and corners). The sixty extant journals and numerous notes in this volume were written from 1869 to 1911 and rank in importance and literary quality with the finest of Muir's books. They begin when Muir, as a young man, came to know California for the first time. These Journals reveal the very soul of John Muir, mystic, poet, scientist. His humor, his power of description, his philosophy, the romance of his far wanderings, all come out in these pages, written with joy and spontaneiry for himself and his intimate friends. - dustjacket flap. Sections cover Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada, the Alsaka Harriman expedition, Arizona notes, Robert Burns, Mount Rainier and more. (Kimes 379).