Nickel Mountain (signed by John Gardner)

First edition, first printing (Knopf, 1973, with the rust orange title page). Signed by Gardner on the front free endpaper. Beautifully illustrated by Thomas O'Donohue. Gardner's 6th book and a finalist for the National Book Award in 1974. Fine in a fine pictorial dust jacket. Fine cream-colored boards. Topstain gray. Internally fine. Octavo. 312 pp. A lovely copy of this Gardner classic!

Nickel Mountain is an uncommon love story: when at 42, the obese, anxious, yet gentle Henry Soames marries 17 year-old Callie Wells (who is pregnant with the child of a local boy) it is much more than years that define the gulf between them. The beauty of this novel is the gradual revelation of the bond that develops as this unlikely couple experiences courtship and marriage, the birth of a son, isolation, forgiveness, work, and death in a small Catskill community in the 1950s.