At least one well known reviewer of nature books somewhat innocently thought that the colleagues of the learned Mr. Ricketts would be surprised to learn that he drank great quantities of beer, and wrote, or concurred in certain bawdy speculations. He did not, however, miss the fundamental point that the book was the joint effort of two authors, who had a lot of fun putting it together.

That was ten years ago. Steinbeck and Ricketts had such a good time with this enterprise that they planned another -- northward, this time -- at first, to the Aleutians, then more realistically, to the Queen Charlottes; and Ricketts began to develop a scheme to interlock his Between Pacific Tides with Sea of Cortez and the new book, The Outer Shores, which was to be in part the result of this northern expedition. He had an elaborate set of cards in two sizes and several colors printed to record all this information, with spaces for cross references to the other books. In the meanwhile, Ed Ricketts had become the Doc of Cannery Row and the legend was beginning to grow. Then one day in 1948 Ed forgot about the afternoon train to Pacific Grove and drove his car into its path. It was not a pleasant or an easy way to die, and the manner of it increased our sense of loss. For many of us, the heart has gone out of Cannery Row now, and only the curious passers-by go down to look at the shack that was once the Pacific Biological Laboratories. Steinbeck was the hardest hit, because Ed was perhaps the only friend who was not in the least awed by his reputation as a writer and treated him first as a human being.