Before Adam

LONDON, Jack

Published by Macmillan, 1907

About this Item

SIGNED First edition of Jack London's Before Adam (1907). lengthily inscribed by London in the year of publication, in the publisher's ORIGINAL DUST JACKET, the only copy of this London best seller in jacket we've seen! Color illustration on frontispiece, illustrations in text by Charles Livingston Bull. Publisher's original light-brown buckram, with wraparound footprints illustration, and tan topstain. Tan dust jacket printed in red. Chipping to top edge of jacket, especially to spine, with loss of text, browning to endpapers. Before Adam tells its story in the words of a narrator who proclaims himself a "freak of heredity" with direct biological access, through his nightmares, to the memories of a prehistoric ancestor, "Big Tooth." The narrator has assembled these memories into a chronological account of Big Tooth's life, which occurred at a stage of prehistory in which humans existed simultaneously at three evolutionary levels. Before Adam has much in common with Stanley Waterloo's The Story of Ab, published in 1897. Waterloo eventually accused London of plagiarism, though the latter denied the charges and insisted he was merely inspired by it. Before Adam employs a common currency with The Story of Ab, of course, in its elements of primeval hordes, brutes, subhumans striving to enter the human state, atavisms, shamanistic racial memories, and so on, but the most probable direct source for London's characters is Darwin's notion of the Primal Horde, in which a powerful male terrorizes the younger males of the group in order to monopolize the females. Remarkably, Before Adam both foreshadows Freud's depiction of the origins of civilization in Totem and Taboo (1913), and obliges Darwin's The Descent of Man (1871). A Very Good copy, signed, inscribed and dated by London in Oakland, CA., in its original dust jacket, preserved in a custom clamshell box. Book #Bv1407. $8800. We specialize in Rare Ayn Rand, and other Legends and Landmarks.

Seller Inventory # Bv1406

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Before Adam
• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication Date: 1907
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Landmarks & Legends