Tarzan and the City of Gold, charmingly inscribed, dated, and signed by Burroughs in Honolulu in 1945, while Burroughs was serving as the nation's oldest war correspondent.
Tarzana, California: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., 1933. First edition. Hardcover. This first edition is compellingly inscribed, dated, and signed by Burroughs in Honolulu, Oahu. The inscription, made less than five years before Burroughs died, dates from the Second World War, when Burroughs served as “the country’s oldest war correspondent.” He would turn seventy three-and-a-half months after writing the inscription herein. Burroughs’s “Laugh It Off” column was published regularly in the Honolulu Advertiser. He visited Australia and several Pacific atolls as a reporter, and he went on several bombing missions.
The inscription, inked in eight lines on the front free endpaper recto, reads: “To | Betsy Tail | - you can blame this | on Phil Bird - | with all good wishes | Edgar Rice Burroughs | Honolulu | 17 May 1945”. Condition is very good plus. The blue cloth binding is square, clean, and tight with sharp corners. Shelf wear is mild and the spine shows only light, uniform toning. The contents are clean, mildly age-toned but showing no spotting or soiling and with strong, unfaded red topstain, only lightly scuffed. “First Edition” is so-stated on the title page verso.
The incredible commercial success of his “Tarzan” novels spurred and enabled Burroughs to incorporate himself in 1923 and by 1931 – two years before this Tarzan installment – Burroughs, Inc. began to publish his books.
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) created Tarzan, “a unique icon of twentieth century literature whose name is recognized around the world.” His early odyssey, poverty and failures markedly contrast with his ultimate celebrity. Burroughs’s formative years render him a character in his own adventure novel. He was born in Chicago, “where he studied Greek and Latin before learning English composition.” In his mid-teens, he spent time on an Idaho ranch with his older brothers, where “he became an expert broncobuster”. From Idaho he was sent to a military academy in Massachusetts, where he was, in one semester, both elected class president and expelled for his rebellion against the formal curriculum. His Civil War Union cavalry officer father sent him to another military academy, this time in Michigan, from which Burroughs managed to graduate, perhaps partly due to his admiration for the commandant, whom Burroughs regarded as “the writer of the best army stories that were ever written.”
An improbable, dizzying succession of haphazard employment followed graduation, ranging from the U.S. Cavalry and railroad policework to peddling a snake oil “cure” for alcoholism and selling pencil sharpeners, spanning Nevada, Illinois, Idaho, and Utah. All this before, in early 1911, he began to write his first story, “influenced by the currently popular theories of astronomer Percival Lowell regarding the canals of Mars.” It sold right away to a pulp fiction magazine, yielding $400 – “a staggering sum” for Burroughs at the time – and was serialized in six installments from February to July 1912. A second story sold to another magazine.
“In the meantime, he had begun writing his third story, ‘Tarzan of the Apes”… It was a compelling study of the interplay between heredity and environment, which had occupied him for some time.” This story brought $700 and the decision to write full time. During the next twelve years he wrote eight novels and sold all of them. Tarzan of the Apes was published in book form in 1914 and became a national bestseller. It was adapted for the silent screen in 1916 – one of the first films to gross more than $1 million. It was the first of a great many Tarzan movies, including twenty-six released in Burroughs’s lifetime. In Burroughs’s final decades, Tarzan was syndicated in daily and Sunday newspapers and featured in radio shows. Tarzan has since featured in television series and become a comic book industry staple. Burroughs’s Tarzan novels have been translated into thirty-four languages. Proceeds from Tarzan paid for Burroughs’s huge ranch in the San Fernando Valley. The city that sprang up around it became “Tarzana”. (ANB). Item #008513
Price: $1,450.00