The Frisco Kid - By Jerry Kamstra

New York: Harper & Row, 1975. First Edition. Signed and inscribed by the author Jerry Kamstra in the year of publication: “For Michael. The real streets of San Francisco. Jerry Kamstra”. Very good plus copy in very good dust jacket with a few tiny nicks and some sunning at spine. A novel based on experiences of the author among his fellow Beats in North Beach, San Francisco, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jerry Kamstra (1935-2019) writes intimately of the scene and the endpapers of the book are maps of the area so can follow the wanderings of his characters. Kamstra writes on the jacket: “When I arrived in San Francisco in 1957, I discovered a community existing on the edge of the city unlike any other in America. Reckless, creative, frenetic, insane, it was too insane for a lot of people, for not many survived. I did, however, and in surviving came of age in the cheap pads and artist’s lofts in North Beach. In the process I lost my innocence and my youth, but gained an indelible memory of a bunch of crazy people, who lived, fought, struggled, lived and even died together with a sense of elan and community that I had never experienced before nor have found since. Writers often dream of being able to record what their friends say and do as they are saying and doing them. Some writers are able to do that, but for me times has to crystallize events, compress them like the effluvia of roots and flowers into hard bright diamonds before the light can be seen. Real people cannot be pinned up on a wall and examined at leisure, however, especially people who were moving at the frenetic pace of my friends. I had to let them stop, and go crazy, and die before, I could properly see them”.