“The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer," writes John Steinbeck in the opening lines of The Log from the Sea of Cortez. The Nobel Prize-winner’s account of the 1940 expedition aboard the seventy-six foot charter Western Flyer—with reliable drinking chum and noted biologist, Ed Ricketts—was conceived to collect marine invertebrates up the Gulf of California coastline. What it became was an internal study of man’s whole self and irrefutably, an exploration of process. "How does one organize an expedition: what equipment is taken, what sources read; what are the little dangers and the large ones? The design is simple, as simple as the design of a well-written book. Your expedition will be enclosed in the physical framework of start, direction, ports of call, and return."