Lives of Game Animals

Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925. Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925-1928.

First edition. Limited to 177 copies, signed by the author on the frontispiece of volume I and with usual cat's paw. This set being number 100. Illustrated with 50 maps and 1500 illustrations. Frontispieces with tissue guards. Four quarto volumes (10 3/4 x 8 1/8 inches; 273 x 206 mm).

Volume I covers "Cats, Wolves, and Foxes", Volume II covers "Bears, Raccoons, Badger, and Weasels", Volume II covers "Deer, Antelope, Buffalo, Sheep, and Peccary" and Volume IV covers "Squirrels, Rabbits, Armadillo, and Opossum."

Uniformly bound in quarter brown cloth over tan cloth. Front boards double-ruled in gilt with animal head gilt central device. Spines lettered in gilt. Top edges gilt, others uncut. Overall near fine, which is unusual for such a large heavy set.

Ernest Thompson Seton was a naturalist, artist, writer, and lecturer and also one of the key founders of the Boy Scouts of America, authoring their handbook. "By 1910, Seton was one of the country's leading nature writers and illustrators...The next fifteen years were chiefly devoted to producing the massive Lives of Game Animals, a four-volume work published between 1925 and 1929, which won him the coveted John Burroughs (1926) and Daniel Giraud Elliott (1928) medals. By ably blending his field experiences with the writings of zoologists and other observers, Seton had created a work that was eminently readable, yet reflected the latest scientific thinking. His landmark insights into animal psychology and emphasis on life histories gave the work its standing as a classic." (American Dictionary of National Biography).

HBS 68014.

$4,000.