One of these centennial or sesquicentennial years we'll be offering the definitive humor book on the California Gold Rush of 1849. Our parody is chock full of truths, lies and other nonsense about one of the most outrageous chapters in human history. Ultimately our book will include about 300 pages of material on the Gold Rush, based on a year's worth of library-skulking and yukky lunch meetings that you really didn't know you needed to know about.
Yes, the book is nearing completion, and has been for some years now, since real life has a way of getting in the way of creative pursuits. The world premiere of excerpts (then 64 pages) from Gold Fools happened at the World Gold Panning Championships in early October, 1998, in Coloma, California. There we sold 15 of our 40 copies. Wow.
But you can download a chapter for FREE for your personal perusal. You can share these nuggets of wackydom and a bit of wisdom with a few friends and foes and tell them where and how to download the chapter , but keep in mind that contents are © 1998 by Betty Sederquist and Ken Kligerman. That means that if we see any of this material in print anywhere else, or we discover that you're using our precious prose for your own gluttonous gain, we lose our sense of humor and sue you and probably make far more than we could have off the proceeds of the book itself. And as nice as we are, some of our best friends are attorneys. Of course, this excludes the public domain stuff we've used (we'll let YOU figure out what's public domain!).
To view Gold Fools, you'll need a free software program called Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the latest version from Adobe.com.
Here's a sample chapter entitled "Gold Rush Women." We're having a bit of fun here with the fact that few women came to California during the Gold Rush years, and some of those weren't perfect specimens of humanity, like Lola Montez.
To receive up-to-date e-mails on our project, please let us know via: Gold Fools
