The Star Rover. With splendid frontispiece in color

A very bright copy. Handsomely bound in finely woven blue cloth with a drawing of billowing clouds on the front boards. Stamped brightly in gilt lettering on the front boards and on the spine. The spine gilt is bright and complete; there is some flecking to several leters in the gilt title on the front boards. Faint touch of wear to the extremities. Very clean and tight throughout with the exception of a marginal smudge on p. 329. Bottom 2" of the inside rear hinge has been re-glued. A handsome, collectible copy of this science-fiction, time travel novel from inside San Quentin State Prison. With 8 pages of ads for Jack's scintillating novels at the back. A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives. I trod interstellar space, exalted by the knowledge that I was bound on vast adventure, where, at the end, I would find all the cosmic formulae and have made clear to me the ultimate secret of the universe. In my hand I carried a long glass wand. It was borne in upon me that with the tip of this wand I must touch each star in passing. And I knew, in all absoluteness, that did I but miss one star I should be precipitated into some unplummeted abyss of unthinkable and eternal punishment and guilt. (Wikipedia) John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, 1876 1916) was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone, including science fiction. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. London was part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposà s The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. (Wikipedia) First Edition with matching dates of 1915 and with "Published October, 1915" on the copyright page. With no subsequent printings listed.…