ON THE MAKALOA MAT

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1919. Original blue-green cloth pictorially decorated in yellow-orange and dark blue. First Edition, which consisted of only 4,972 copies -- far fewer than earlier titles. This was London's last collection of short stories, published posthumously: the seven tales, all sited in Hawaii, were written in 1916 (the year of his death), either while he was there or back home in Glen Ellen. As with THE RED ONE, most of the tales tell of ancient wisdom confounding modern materialism. He [Jack] now used his rooted fears as plots for his stories. He even tried to exorcise his lifelong fear and sense of loss regarding his mother in a comic story, "The Tears of Ah Kim," in which the good and successful son still endures his aged mother's endless beatings with a stick, but never cries out until the day he weeps from the joy of knowing that her blows have become too feeble to hurt him and that she must die soon [Sinclair]. This is a near- fine copy (fine except for some old shadows and cellotape marks on the endpapers) of this none-too-common book. Sisson & Martens p. 102; Blanck 11981.…