Once in the Saddle; and Paso Por Aqui
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927. First Edition. Octavo. Item #028515
3-258(1) pages. What many consider the best Western fiction ever written is a plot rooted in the West that the author knew but was already undergoing change in the last decades of the 19th century. The plot deals with a robber who attempts an escape and is foiled but the subtlety of his writing is that it is not the man's enemies that prevent his escape but the encroachment of change. As the West with its hardships and tough realities were lost, a new crasser and less honest world was emerging. He is able in his fine writing to capture the horseman's love for his horse without sentimentality. The plaque over his grave reads: Paso por Aqui, Eugne Manlove Rhodes, 1869-1934. The irony was that this man of the old West was forced to leave for New York to rejoin his family. It was a place he hated and when he asked where the old timers had gone, he said: "Some are in heaven and some in New York." Bound in brown cloth lettered and stamped in black depicting a saddle, spine lettering black, pictorial endpapers, in unclipped pictorial dust jacket lettered in white, some rubbing along the edges, a couple of chips to head and a couple to corners. A very nice copy. Copies with dust jacket are scarce.
Price: $350.00