The Game

Item Details

New York, Macmillan, 1905, Hardback

First

The Game, Jack London, Macmillan, New York, 1905, 5 3/8 x 7.75 inches, 182 pp.

Rare first edition in original unrestored dust jacket, housed in custom cloth chemise and full morocco slipcase. Dust jacket bears light edge wear; some small chips to head and foot of spine, corners; 3/4 inch closed tear to front top edge, and 1 1/2 inch closed tear to fold of rear flap; crease to back panel; spine lightly sun faded; overall good condition. Pictorial green cloth boards; colors remarkably bright; corners and top and bottom edge lightly rubbed; one corner slightly bumped; deckled bottom and fore-edge, gilt top edge; pictorial endpapers; front hinge cracked, mull fabric visible, but board still tightly attached; else interior clean, unmarked; collated, all color plates present including frontispiece. Good condition. 

Though best known for his tales of rugged wilderness adventures such as “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang”, Jack London was also a boxing aficionado, writing about the sport in short stories and news articles as well as partaking in it himself. “Boxing exhilarated Jack London,” wrote Scott D. Emmert in the Cambridge Companion to Boxing. “Its drama sharpened his appetite for vivid stories, and its spectacle of violent survival justified his Darwinian convictions. He needed no further motivation to become a boxing journalist and the first American writer to turn the sport into material for adult fiction” (Emmert 246).  

The Game was initially serialized in Metropolitan Magazine between April and May 1905, and drew controversy when critics accused London of inaccuracy, specifically regarding a scene where a boxer dies by hitting his head on the canvas. He responded by stating, “All I can say… is that a young fighter in this very club described in my book has had his head smashed in this manner.” The controversy came to an end when boxing champion Jimmy Britt reviewed the novel and stated that he particularly enjoyed it “on account of its trueness to life” (New York Times Saturday Review of Books, Sept. 2, 1905).