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James M. Dourgarian, Bookman
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2341 Hickory Drive
Concord, CA 94520
925-349-4400
Established1980 - Member ABAA
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Click on the shopping basket by a item to create an email for us to contact you about ordering that item. You may also call 1 (925) 349-4400 to talk to Jim and place a phone order with Visa, Mastercard, or Discover. You may also arrange to pay by check. Click on the link below to email a general inquiry.
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James M.Dourgarian, Bookman, was established in 1980. We are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA). Like all ABAA members, we answer to a higher authority and follow a higher standard of ethics that guarantees a successful transaction for all our customers.
We buy and sell old books, vintage books, collectible books, rare books, first edition books, and related ephemera. We maintain several specialties. Among them are American fiction first editions from c.1900 to the present. Within that general field, we have heavy emphasis in John Steinbeck and Steinbeckiana. Thus, we buy and sell Steinbeck primary first editions in dust jackets, signed/limited editions, his appearances in anthologies, his periodical appearances, books and periodicals about Steinbeck, film and theatre memorabilia, bibliographies, and miscellaneous items.
We also specialize in these same categories for these authors -- Jack London, Wallace Stegner, and Stephen King. Other specialties include Western Americana, books on California and the West, Photography books, books on Japan, China, and the Orient, and Armed Services Editions. The latter are vintage paperbacks issued to American GIs from 1943 to 1947. They are comprised of mysteries, Westerns, science fiction and fantasy, mainstream fiction, historical novels, science, poetry, adventure stories, and more.
Within our field of modern first editions, we also sell related film memorabilia Thus, we sell film posters, lobby card sets, pressbooks, stills, scripts, etc. for films made from the works of authors we carry such as John Steinbeck, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Zane Grey, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stephen King, Edward Abbey, Anne Rice, and many others.
| [John Steinbeck] Steinbeck, John. Autograph Letter Signed. n.p. (NY), John Steinbeck, n.d. (c.1953), first edition. Steinbeck writes a lengthy (165 lines) letter on his usual long, yellow, ruled paper on rectos and versos to long-time friend and key figure in his literary career, Alice Cohee, in 1933 she urged him to try one more time to place Tortilla Flat, previous attempts fell flat, at that time he had three books published, none of which were successful, he did try again after following her advice, Covici Freide took the book which then launched his Nobel Prize-winning career, he then gifted her a specially bound copy of Tortilla Flat, one of only two copies, it is a chatty letter discussing a number of topics with a close friend from his birthday to nuclear war to writing projects, "Thank you for your birthday letter. It had the wrong address and the wrong zone and it still got to Annie Laurie Williams (one of his agents) who forwarded it to me," he writes to her that he has trouble believing her two sons have grown up, one became a doctor and one a French professor, he writes about the nuclear age, "We're doing very well with fission. Took us a quarter of a million years to get used to fire. We've only had 12 years to take care of a force more tricky and I think it has been handled very well. I don't think the big bombs will ever be used but if they should be - perhaps some little colony of the species might survive - or not. Plenty of species have disappeared without disturbing the explosive process of our exploding universe. I don't think the nuclear process is bad once you can admit that change is inevitable and that status quo is a myth," he writes, "...I find it fascinating because those people who would truly be afraid of the bears in Yellowstone Park would really and truly venture themselves on the moon. What a lonely species we are - so good and so brave and so cowardly and so mean all in the same bundle," he reports that he is "...cocooning. My childish and terribly important placing of words on paper have ceased to satisfy me and so I am lying fallow," he goes on, "And to take up the fallow time I am doing a work of semi-scholarship. I am doing a re-telling of Malory's Morte. But to do this I have to go back to the 13th century and learn all I could and can about it and the three succeeding centuries and in all directions - political,physical, legal, religious, social, sexual, kinetic, sociologic, etc. In other words, I am trying to be able to think like a fifteenth century man. Only then can I know how Malory - as a novelist - thought when he was gathering together the great stories of the Morte," he writes that he has been at this since he was nine years old, he writes that "The cult of the hero mythos is rising again just as it did in the 15th century and probably for the same reasons," he says the heroes, modern or ancient, are the same people, "They attack problems and dragons in the same way. Only their weapons have changed a little. Malory knew Good Guys and Bad Guys too and they had the same faces," he goes on, "I shall be ready to start writing this in the Fall. And it will go to three or more volumes. And in the process I hope I will have lost my literary trick which has ceased to satisfy me. I may, in a sense be reborn to struggle and difficulty and the perplexity and despair and shouting pleasure of creation," he goes on, "I have loved people and been loved by people - I have had work I loved and it has been loved by some. I have had and still have great sexual satisfaction and the sweetness of ending a day satisfied with the work of that day. It has been enough. I have been very fortunate when I see myself against the background of other people. The one thing I will not tolerate is repetition," about his Mallory project he writes, "I am excited about my present work. In a way it is creative work - in a way the most creative work I have ever done, but once it is done, I shall try to go to a new world and a new language and I shall not be too sad if the juices have dried up. I don't feel that they have. In fact, I feel that whole new resources remain to be tapped. I don't know what I'm trying to say - except that I am all right - more than all right - alive!" he goes on to write about his non-literary life, "The terrible year of madness in Pacific Grove had a good effect. Madness may in its way be curative. I have a good and sweet marriage. I have a little place on the end of Long Island where I can plant things and a little boat to fish from. My boys are pleasures to me - bad kids they are and good kids - real and startling human beings - just like everyone else and still new things in the world. And I'm pretty sure have finally learned to let them be what they are - unique things in the world and not to attempt to make them small misshapen models of my own failures ands desires and prejudices. I don't even have to be proud of them. I can enjoy them without even that prejudice," signed "Affectionately/John," housed in its original mailing envelope addressed by Steinbeck, this letter was not recorded in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Folded for mailing with some marks on the paper, envelope has been torn open. JD 36981 |  $8,500.00 |
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