The Silverado Squatters

Robert Louis Stevenson's love song of the Napa Valley
This collector's edition book is Stevenson's magnificent song of solitude to the Napa Valley of 1880. His beautifully crafted prose creates a lyrical celebration of living simply, amid the silence and solitude of an abandoned silver mine in California's Napa.

It was there in the bunkhouse of the Silverado mine that he and his bride, her son and their dog lived for two glorious months in the summer of 1880. Silverado is America's other Walden, and Stevenson's language is as lofty as was his view from Napa's Mount Saint Helena.

We commissioned the calligrapher Mandy Young to ornament the text with her exquisite lettering, and to illustrate it, the highly regarded Napa Valley artist, Earl Thollander (1922-2001). Each of the six chapters that we selected from the original book features one of Earl's glorious watercolors.

This was Earl's last published work. He once told us that Stevenson's mountain had been his mountain, too—he could see it from his studio. Silverado may well be your mountain—a book to read and reread until it seems that you, like Stevenson, have found your "corner of the blue hall of heaven."

Click here to read a few excerpts.

Click here for a behind-the-book look at the artists of Silverado.