Oranges by John McPhee [FIRST EDITION] • 5th Printing / 1978 • Farrar Straus & Giroux

Oranges by John McPhee

FIRST EDITION • FIFTH PRINTING [1978] FARRAR STRAUS & GIROUX

Hardcover with dust jacket in very good condition.

Dust jacket has a few worn edges and some marbling to rear; but is otherwise, clean vibrant and in tact; now housed in a new archival quality brodart jacket protector.

Book itself is beautiful; pristine blue cloth boards.   Reads flawllesly.

A classic of reportage, Oranges was first conceived as a short magazine article about oranges and orange juice, but the author kept encountering so much irresistible information that he eventually found that he had in fact written a book. It contains sketches of orange growers, orange botanists, orange pickers, orange packers, early settlers on Florida's Indian River, the first orange barons, modern concentrate makers, and a fascinating profile of Ben Hill Griffin of Frostproof, Florida who may be the last of the individual orange barons.

McPhee's astonishing book has an almost narrative progression, is immensely readable, and is frequently amusing. Louis XIV hung tapestries of oranges in the halls of Versailles, because oranges and orange trees were the symbols of his nature and his reign. This book, in a sense, is a tapestry of oranges, too—with elements in it that range from the great orangeries of European monarchs to a custom of people in the modern Caribbean who split oranges and clean floors with them, one half in each hand.