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Trout Fishing in America
San Francisco, Four Seasons, 1967. The true first edition of Brautigan's breakthrough book, which established his unique writing style and sensibility and for the first time earned him a wide audience. Issued as "Writing 14" in the Four Seasons Foundation publishing series and preceding the Delta edition. Don Allen of Four Seasons picked up Trout Fishing after Grove Press dumped Brautigan when A Confederate General from Big Sur failed to meet sales expectations when it was published in 1964. With virtually no advertising or promotion, Trout Fishing went through multiple printings, sold 35,000 copies -- an unheard of number for any Four Seasons Foundation publication -- and made Brautigan one of the key writers of his generation. The book has sold two million copies in all its editions. The first edition of Trout Fishing is one of the most elusive of the key books of the 1960s. Reportedly its first printing was, like several other Four Seasons Foundation books, 1000 copies (2000 has also been stated); but copies of Trout Fishing turn up with markedly less frequency than his other Four Seasons Foundation titles, In Watermelon Sugar and The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster: currently, one online site has listings for 14 copies of the Four Seasons edition of Watermelon and 20 copies of The Pill; the only copies of Trout Fishing listed are third and fourth printings or heavily worn ex-library copies. Often when copies do turn up, their condition is poor from having been read and re-read and, often, passed around. We could find records of only four copies appearing at auction, and three of those copies had pages detached. This copy has a coffee stain on the rear cover, light reading creases to the spine, and pages 9-18 detached. A good copy in wrappers only, but an extraordinary rarity in the first printing. [#031656] SOLD

All books are first printings of first editions or first American editions unless otherwise noted.

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