Nuggets and Dust by "Dod Grile," Ambrose Bierce's second book, was published under his pseudonym by Chatto and Windus in London in 1871, when Bierce was an expatriate. Its subtitle is "Panned Out in California," loosely arranged by "J. Milton Sloluck," another of Bierce's pseudonyms. It was a cheap paperback showing on the cover a miner panning gold and holding a knife. In this first and only edition (until now) there were ads on the back cover for Crosby's Balsamic Cough Elixir and Dr. Rooke's Oriental Pills and Solar Elixir, plus several pages of ads at the front.

Essentially, the book reprinted bits and pieces from Bierce's "Town Crier" columns in the San Francisco News-Letter as well as more current jottings. It was neither physically nor literarily a handsome product, and Bierce never republished it. The contents might be described as amusing trifles. It's now a rarity for Bierce collectors. A recent Internet search located only two copies for sale, both at high prices and in poor condition. in 2017, Didcot House, which appears to be based in the U.K., came out with a paperback edition using Amazon's Create Space.

Now, a firm called Reink Books of Delhi, India, is offering a paperback edition for $15.07 with no overseas shipping fee. Strangely, the Reink edition, distributed by S N Books World, identifies the author nowhere in the book, merely a plain cover with the title and an ID number. The book is said to have been reprinted from the original edition, and appears to be a facsimile, evidence of what this rare Bierce item actually looked like when the pages were opened.

From the aforementioned, below is a sample of Ambrose Bierce's tongue-in-cheek cynicism and misanthropy in a section titled "Man in Quantity" in which he takes to task all mankind:

It is impossible for one to look at him without a lively disgust, similar to that inspired by the spectacle of a tangled web of rattlesnakes thawing and reeking in the spring sunlight. A single individual of the species is intolerable, but put a score of them into close contact, and straightway they shall begin to enact you so varied and multifold unpleasantness -- so distracting and displeasing pranks -- a myriad of so fathomless abominations, that one would fain be a dog, if that dog only were any better or worse -- which they are not.

We never look upon man without thinking of that horrid -- perhaps fabled -- animal that is clean-limbed, and sweet, and gracious, and comely, but which no sooner touches one of its kind than it begins to expire a noxious odor.... Immortal, are you, yahoo? Godlike? In the image of your Maker? And yet you thieve, you beat wives, and you die in all manner of unseemly ways!

You give lectures and give birth; you have collisions, and fires, and divine service, and the small-pox. Talk not to us, monster, of your godlike attributes; we know you for a most pestilent and forbidding beast requiring the constant purification of water, and oft-renewed anointing with perfumes.

--Ambrose Bierce