James Clark Michel Halbouty SPINDLETOP First Edition Double Signed
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James Clark Michel Halbouty SPINDLETOP First Edition Double Signed
First USA edition, first print hardback of SPINDLETOP The True Story of the Oil Discovery That Changed the World, by James Anthony Clark and Michel Thomas Halbouty, published by Random House Inc., New York, in 1952. Signed by both authors on the front endpaper.The book is in very good condition (Clean pictorial brown cloth boards with gold lettering on the spine which has slight rubbing to the edges) with light wear to the illustrated dust jacket which is not price clipped (creasing and chipping to the spine edges and to the top corners, a one centimeter closed tear to the bottom corner, slight creasing line to the edges and some brown stains at the back, but nothing too drastic). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no other inscriptions. There is slight tanning to the pages.
Michel Thomas Halbouty (21 June 1909 in Beaumont, Texas - 6 November 2004 in Houston, Texas) was an American geologist, petroleum engineer, and wildcatter. Credited with discovering more than 50 oil and gas fields, he twice declared bankruptcy, but came back each time to regain wealth. He authored hundreds of technical articles on petroleum geology, and two book-length histories of famous oil fields. Halbouty is often described, including in his New York Times obituary, as legendary. Halbouty's father, a Lebanese immigrant, ran a grocery store. Michel Halbouty got his first job in the oil business as a boy, bringing ice water to the drillers at the Spindletop oil field south of Beaumont.
James A. Clark, author, columnist, and public-relations consultant and historian of the oil industry. The publication of his first book, Spindletop (1952), with Michel T. Halbouty, gave Clark a position in the oil industry. He began a firm for public-relations consulting, the James A. Clark Company, and started a regular oil column, "Tales of the Oil Country," which he wrote for the next fourteen years. He also began research for other books on the oil industry. In 1954 he published Three Stars for the Colonel: The Biography of Ernest O. Thompson, and in 1958 The Tactful Texan: A Biography of Governor Will Hobby. His other books include The Chronological History of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Industries (1963) and The Last Boom (1972). Spindletop is listed in John H. Jenkins IIIqv's Basic Texas Books.
"'January 10, 1901 - a momentous day in history. At 10:30 in the morning the first great American gusher "roared in like a shot from a heavy cannon and spouted oil a hundred feet over the top of the derrick out on the hummock that the world would soon know as Spindletop.
Overnight the town of Beaumont, Texas became a bedlam. The population doubled and doubled again. In hotels and boarding houses, men slept in relays, twenty to a room. Speculators made fortunes, and lost them in the gambling halls that kept open 24 hours a day. At one point, oil was so plentiful that it sold for three cents a barrel and water so scarce that a barrel brought $6.
Spindletop is the true story of the oil discovery that changed the world - of the events leading up to it and the boom days that followed. It is a fascinating tale of men against odds and the incidents which molded men and ideas together to form the nucleus of the modern oil industry. And it is brought vividly alive by its colourful portraits of the men who played a part in this great adventure.
Written by men who have known the field all their lives, Spindletop reveals for the first time the whole story of the discovery that inaugurated the rise of America to dominant world power and helped its people to security and the abundant life."
306 pages. Illustrated with numerous black & white photographs, diagrams and maps on the endpapers.
ISBN: n/a
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James Clark Michel Halbouty SPINDLETOP First Edition Double Signed