Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, (1969). SIGNED hardcover first edition - Marshal Bond, Jr. - who accompanied his father on several of his journeys - tells the story of his father's adventurous life, using his firsthand knowledge as well as his father's diaries and letters. Bond (1867-1941) drove cattle in Texas, went to the Klondike to search for gold, where he became friends with Jack London (the dog in Call of the Wild is based on Bond's dog) and from there to the deserts of the Southwest and to Mexico City. He boated the Colorado River, lived in a shack in Goldfield Nevada, where he reported on the gold rush there, found himself in the middle of Pancho Villa's fighting in Mexico in 1918, traveled the length of Africa and finally in the 1930s to the gold rush in the Mohave in California. INSCRIBED on the half title page. Illustrated with photographs. Index. x, 258 pp.

New York: Detective Book Club, (1943) dj. Hardcover first edition - An omnibus edition containing three complete mystery novels - The Case of The Drowsy Mosquito by Gardner in which Perry Mason agrees to take on a case of mine ownership manipulation (and suggests marriage to Della Street); Motto for Murder by Mace, set at snowed in house in the Adirondacks; The Affair of The Fainting Butler by Knight set in Los Angeles and featuring Professor Huntoon Rogers. One of the pleasures of these omnibus volumes, which combine three very different works in one book, is the opportunity they create of discovering authors or novels which might be unknown to you. The pages appear to be acid free, and are still white and supple, unlike many books from this era. Each novel paginated individually - 214, 193, 212 pp. Back cover of dust jacket has an ad for the Detective Book Club and a reminder to buy war stamps and bonds.

New York & London: Harper & Brothers, 1938. Hardcover first edition - Described at the time of publication as "a thriller of the atomic age", this was Priestley's only novel set primarily in California. On the dedication page, he refers to it as a "fairy tale in Western rig." A review on "Reading California Fiction" commented "A British architect plays tennis with a beautiful but mysterious Californian in France; an American physicist searches for a missing colleague in England; a global adventurer arrives in Los Angeles to investigate the murder of his brother. The three come together in Barstow, the largest town in the Mojave Desert. There they find a common interest in the activities of a small group of religious fundamentalists. It turns out the group is not merely looking forward to the end of the world but planning to bring it about. This book has a thriller-like story - someone is scheming to blow up the world - but . . . the plot unfolds at a leisurely pace. Although not action packed, the book is notable for its main plot point and many vivid descriptions of the California desert. Readers, incidentially, may be surprised that Priestley had so much information (not all of it accurate) on the explosive possibilities of splitting the atom in 1938, years before the bomb was actually created." 287 pp.