NY, Viking, (1964). Kesey's second novel, the presumed first issue, with Viking ship logo on first half-title, in the first issue dust jacket with photo credited to Hank Krangler instead of Hank Kranzler. Inscribed by Kesey with a full-page drawing on the front free endpaper -- a drawing of a shelf of books, the titles of which comprise the inscription, above a record player, the music of which is represented and gives the message "I'll be seeing you/ Ken Kesey." The inscription reads as follows: "For Bill & Ann.. - / [The following as book titles on a shelf] So/ until/ more/ time or place/ when face to face/ we try one/ other scene/ or what I mean/ is/ when again/ we see/ what then/ ?/ and lock/ our horns/ in trial and/ laff and/ talk.../ [As music] I'll be seeing/ [As knobs on an amplifier/ YOU/ [signed] Ken Kesey." The image also contains what appears to be a supersonic jet flying over the bookshelf, with the annotation "ROAR" trailing behind it. The recipients were Bill Gilliland and his wife, Ann. Gilliland was a Texas friend of Larry McMurtry, who worked in a bookstore with McMurtry in the early and mid-1960s and who, as a result of his friendship with McMurtry -- who was a good friend of Kesey's -- hosted Kesey when he came to Dallas in 1964, shortly after the publication of Sometimes a Great Notion, to give a reading and talk at the Wellesley College Club Books & Authors luncheon. McMurtry and Kesey had become friends at Stanford University, where they both participated in Wallace Stegner's Writing Workshop, and McMurtry hung out with Kesey at Perry Lane, where an early psychedelic scene flourished, which later moved to La Honda, where the Merry Pranksters were born. McMurtry's Perry Lane time was recounted in his novel All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. Kesey's talk at the Wellesley College Club was controversial and in some respects famously unsuccessful. He was invited because he was a promising, up-and-coming young author of a critically acclaimed second novel, just recently published; but Kesey was already embarked on the trajectory that would lead him away from the literary life and toward becoming an icon of the counterculture, having recently completed his cross-country trip with the Pranksters in the school bus they called Furthur. Instead of simply giving a reading as everyone expected, Kesey turned the occasion into a piece of performance art, engaging the audience -- largely made up of wealthy, rather formal Dallas matrons -- in unexpected and provocative ways, tossing rubber balls at them unexpectedly and generally disrupting any sense of decorum that might have prevailed on the occasion. Afterward it was made clear he would never be invited back; it wasn't clear if he would even receive the agreed-upon fee for his speaking, and when he returned home to Gilliland's house he got very stoned, if he wasn't already, and drew the inscription in this book. Gilliland described all this later, and a Dallas newspaper apparently covered the occasion as well. An early, unique inscription by Kesey, roughly contemporary with publication of the book and perhaps the closest thing to a poem that we have seen Kesey write. Probably the best Kesey inscription we've ever encountered. [#911056] SOLD