Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909. First edition. Signed by John Muir on the upper free endpaper. A Very Good+ copy. Slight darkening to cloth, with a bit of fraying to spine ends and a couple bumps to edges of boards. Inner hinge holding firm despite some splitting (approx. 45mm) at the top. Binding just a bit shaken. Toning to preliminary blank, title-page, and lower endpapers from old laid-in papers. Otherwise, a very clean copy throughout.

Stickeen is Muir's memoir of a perilous journey in the wilds of Alaska with his titular canine companion. Though Stickeen initially "seemed so small and worthless," the dog, over the course of the grueling adventure, proved "that he was a perfect wonder of a dog, could endure cold and hunger like a bear, swim like a seal, and was wondrous wise and cunning, etc., making out a list of virtues to show he might be the most ineresting member of the party" (p. 5). Though Muir undertook that Alaskan voyage in 1880, the memory of Stickeen remained with him for decades: a shorter, heavily edited version of the story was first published in the Century magazine in 1897 as "An Adventure with a Dog and a Glacier," and he told the tale again in his 1915 Alaskan Adventures. In those later reflections on Stickeen, he wrote, "I have known many dogs, and many a story I could tell of their wisdom and devotion; but to none do I owe so much as to Stickeen. At first the least promising and least known of my dog-friends, he suddenly became the best known of them all. Our storm-battle for life brought him to light, and through him as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals." Stickeen now ranks among classic dog stories like Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) and Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows (1961). Very Good + (Item #7775)