I’ve been tied up with various things and haven’t been able to book blog as much as I would like. Plus blogging with Bluehost is a constant struggle, and I really need to get on the stick about moving this blog.
But I had a three day weekend, and I had a little time, so I thought I’d blog some things from the backlog. It took a little longer than I expected, for the usual reasons.
This time, though, I’m not doing gun books. Oh, I have plenty of those to blog. But I wanted to do something different. So these are not “gun” books in the sense I would use. A couple of these are peripherally “gun” books, and a couple are completely not “gun” books.
So: weird Australian mammals, a cookbook, a history book, and Roy Chapman Andrews after the jump…
Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals, Jack Ashby. William Collins, London, 2022. I believe this is a true first, and I would describe it as in “as new” condition.
In spite of the title, this book does not just cover the platypus: it also covers echidnas, marsupials, and other Australian wildlife. I haven’t read it yet, but going off the jacket copy, the author (a museum director at Cambridge) seems to think that people have a tendency to belittle and make fun of Australian wildlife, and he believes that’s wrong: this kind of thinking contributes to the extinction of those animals.
I don’t know if I agree or disagree. I’m just looking forward to reading more about the platypus. And the wombat. And wombat poop.
The Zane Grey Cookbook, Barbara and George Reiger. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Clifs, NJ, 1976.
Callahan and Company had me when the description mentioned that this book includes a history of the dutch oven. I gather this is pretty much what you’d expect from the title: recipes for outdoor and wild game cooking in the style that Zane Grey would have adopted on his excursions. I think my stepfather would have enjoyed this one.
This is a nice, but not perfect copy. There’s a bit of shelf wear to the top and bottom, a small divot out of the back cover at the top of the spine, and I’d say about a 1/2″ tear on the bottom of the front cover (but the tear is well hidden by the jacket protector). It still looks nice on the shelf or the coffee table.
(Speaking of coffee, according to the Cookbook, not only was Mr. Grey an abstainer from alcohol, he also avoided coffee and tea after spending some time with the Latter Day Saints. His favorite drink was…cool (not cold) water.)
Both of these were in the same order from Callahan and Company. I can’t find the invoice now (I may not have scanned it) but it looks like I paid $61 total for both of these (including shipping).
Alps and Elephants: Hannibal’s March, Sir Gavin De Beer. E.F. Dutton and Company, New York, 1955. Second printing February 1957.
This is the kind of weird thing that, when I saw it in the Callahan and Company catalog, immediately pushed my “must have” button. Sir de Beer was a natural historian (and director of the British Museum of Natural History) who decided to use science and natural history to settle a question…
…what route did Hannibal and his elephants take across the Alps?
The ancient historians gave only vague indications of the route, yet the clues were sufficient for Sir Gavin to reconstruct it by applying science to the problem. The question of whether the elephants were African or Indian was decided with the help of contemporary coins; the puzzling problem of the identity of the river called Skaras was solved by checking the seasonal rates of flow; Sir Gavin determined which Alpine pass was used from the altitude of the perpetual snow-line, fixed the date of the march from astronomical data…
There’s some edge wear at the top and bottom, and one small tear/chip on the top front cover. But I think this is in pretty fair shape for a nearly 70 year old book. $24 plus shipping from Callahan and Company in a different order.
Heart of Asia: True Tales of the Far East, Roy Chapman Andrews. Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, New York, 1951. This is a book club edition.
One of the more recent Gun Digests, as I recall, had an article on “The Guns of Roy Chapman Andrews”, so when this came up in the C&C catalog, I tried to buy it. Sadly, they’d sold that copy before I got to them. But they put it on my want list, and when this book club edition came up, reached out to me.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mr. Andrews, he was a leading explorer and naturalist in the first half of the 20th Century. He spent a lot of time in Asia, including Mongolia. He was the first person to find fossilized dinosaur eggs. And he was a popular writer, as well as being a skilled marksman.
(“He had an accidental injury to his foot when his collecting pistol went off.”)
There are people who claim Mr. Andrews was the real-life model for Indiana Jones. There are others who claim that he was one of the models for the heroes in the old adventure movies of the 1940s and 1950s, and those were the inspiration for Jones.
This seems to be a collection of shorter stories about Mr. Andrews, his explorations in Asia, and his interactions with the natives. It’d be a pretty nice copy, except for a small chip on the top rear of the jacket. But it is a book club copy, so the pages are starting to brown. It’ll do for reading, but I’m still on the lookout for a true first. $28 in the same order with Alps (and there was $5 shipping for both).
Next time, I plan to get back to gun books. I’m not quite sure which ones yet, but here’s a sneak preview of something that amused me:
