[McMURTRY, Larry (1936-2021), his copy]. WHITE, E.B. (1899-1985). Here is New York. New York: Harper & Brothers, [1949].

8vo. Original beige cloth lettered in red (spine sunned); original dust jacket (spine sunned, chipping at ends, few spots on rear panel). Provenance: Larry McMurtry (his bookplate, which he designed, features the horseshoe-shaped brand his father and grandfather used on the McMurtry cattle), from his personal library at his home in Archer City.

FIRST EDITION, INSCRIBED BY WHITE TO MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES, in the year of publication. Panter-Downes (1906-1997) was a British novelist and columnist for The New Yorker, known for her bestselling 1923 novel The Shoreless Sea. In 1925, White submitted several pieces to The New Yorker, and the following year he took a job at the magazine editing newsbreaks. He quickly established himself as the editorial voice of the magazine for nearly five decades. “In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan, with the reader arm-in-arm, remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city and The New Yorker calls it ‘the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city’ (book review). A fantastic association copy inscribed to a fellow contributor at The New Yorker.