The Tools of My Trade
The Annotated Books in Jack London's Library

By David M. Hamilton

• New Edition, Published by The Live Oak Press®, LLC will be issued in 2008
• 326 pp.
• $40.00 paperback, ISBN 0-931378-09-5

California novelist and short-story writer Jack London wrote more than fifty books during his forty-year lifetime, including the classic The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and Martin Eden. How did he come to write these books? What inspired him? Where did he get his plots, his themes, his motifs? Where did he find the material to develop his characters? In short, how did Jack London perform his writer's craft?

The answers to these questions can, in part, be found in The Tools of My Trade. In this well-researched study of London's library, David Hamilton examines some four hundred books that London annotated, read, reread, marked, and quoted. The bibliography provides the sources for London's The Call of the Wild, The Star-Rover, The Mutiny of the Elsinore, and The Scorn of Women, as well as the short-story classic "To Build a Fire." In an introductory essay of nearly fifty pages, Hamilton sketches London's lifetime reading habits, examines his literary apprenticeships, discusses the importance of the sea-going Snark library, and takes a look at London's daily routine.

The culmination of ten years of research, including a page-by-page search through London's 15,000-volume library (still intact after more than seventy years), The Tools of My Trade offers literary historians, creative writers, bibliographers, and anyone interested in the writings of one of America's most famous literary figures revealing information about Jack London and his writing and research methods.

David Hamilton is the former assistant curator of literary manuscripts, including the Jack London archive, at the Henry E. Huntington Library, and has written extensively on Jack London. He is now an independent publishing  consultant and owner of The Live Oak Press®, LLC publishing company.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments / xiii
• Introduction / 1
• Annotated Bibliography / 49
• Notes / 301
• Appendix / 305
• Index / 311

List of Photographs

• Jack London Atop Sonoma Mountain
• Jack London
• Reading in Oakland, ca. 1902
• Jack London and George Wharton James
• In Korea as a Newspaper Correspondent
• A Lover of Horses, ca. 1905
• Aboard the Roamer
• Korean War Correspondent, 1904
• Jack and Charmian London and the No. 7 Remington
• Jack London
• Learning to Navigate
• Clara Charmian Kittredge London
• Jack London and George Wharton James
• At Robert Louis Stevenson's Grave
• George Sterling, Edwin Markham, and Jack London at Bohemian Grove
• Jack London, Rex Beach, and Eddie Smith, ca. 1914
• Sailing on San Francisco Bay

Cataloging Information

• Hamilton, David Mike:
  "The Tools of My Trade:" The Annotated Books in Jack London's Library
  Seattle, Washington, and London, England
  University of Washington Press [c1986]
   xiv, 326 p.; ill.
   Bibliography: p. 301-303.  Includes index. Class: PS3523.O46
  
  Subjects
  London, Jack, 1876-1916, Books and reading
  London, Jack, 1876-1916, Library, Catalogs

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