Peever Leslie E (1 results)
Published by Pageant Press, Inc. (c.1963), New York, 1963
- Hardcover
- First Edition
- Signed
Seller: ReadInk, ABAA/IOBA, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A.ReadInk, ABAA/IOBA
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used - Near fine
US$ 75.00
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Add to basketHardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Good dj. First Edition. [modest shelfwear to bottom edge, otherwise a good sound copy; the jacket is heavily worn at the edges, with a number of tiny nicks and tears along the top and bottom edges of the front panel and spine]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the front endpaper. Vanity-pres…s novel set in the small town of Hallettville, described as "a rustic, undernourished crossroads town . . . a dreadfully dismal place, a hamlet sadly neglected, almost forgotten on the low, level plains of Ohio." There's nothing unusual about a vanity-press book being author-signed, of course (for some titles it's hard to find an UNsigned copy), but this one commands a little extra attention, if only for its size alone: at 561 pages, it's a bit of an epic as these things go. (This is no small matter when you consider that the author had to foot the bill for the printing; maybe he compensated by ordering a small print run, which might in turn account for the book's scarcity today, with no copies in online commerce at the time of cataloging, and no library copies recorded in OCLC.) As is often the case with such books, one suspects that the author was following the well-worn advice often dispensed to aspiring writers to "write what you know," and therefore that the town depicted in the novel is a fictionalized version of a real place, and the event are derived from some local lore (or scandal). For what it's worth, the jacket blurb notes that one of the author's first jobs as a young man was an editorial position at a small-town newspaper in Wood County, Ohio -- and that the book's protagonist is (surprise!) a young newspaperman. The "tracks" of the book's title are, naturally, the railroad tracks, which bisect the town into "two hostile camps: on one side, the town of Hallettville proper, and on the other, Hallett Hall, the forbiddingly walled residence of the town's founder." As the newspaperman delves into this "uneasy division" and the town's "strange inertia," he discovers that the town's impressive (but abandoned) church had been built by a "strange religious sect of Missionites" that had been brought to the town by its founder, and that the departure of the sect's minister had left "dark secrets and whispered incidents" in its wake. The plot boils down, ultimately, to "the struggle of conscience to reconcile the opposing forces of good and evil." (One other possibility, for the conspiracy-minded, is that the book is so scarce today because the relatively few copies were bought up by the residents of whatever town was the real-life Hallettville -- and that maybe some of them thought it would be a good idea to supress it.) Signed by Author. Illustrated by (dj design) Cynthia Pennell (illustrator).
