Books and Manuscripts

Roosevelt, Theodore
African Game Trails An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910. In two volumes. First and limited deluxe edition, #169/500 numbered sets on Ruisdael paper, signed by Theodore Roosevelt. From the library of American adventurer and naturalist Brooke Dolan II. With half-title in each volume, and title-pages printed in red and in black. Illustrated with photogravure frontispieces, one map, and 47 photogravure plates of reproductions of photographs by Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, and of drawings by Philip R. Goodwin; each with original captioned tissue guards. Publisher's three-quarter tan pigskin over beige paper-covered boards, stamped in blind; all edges untrimmed; second volume largely unopened; scattered light foxing to text in each volume; in very rare original dust-jackets, spines darkened, and with remnants of original slip case.

Scarce signed and limited deluxe edition, in the very rare original dust-jackets, of Theodore Roosevelt's account of his hunting expedition through Eastern Africa in the years immediately following his presidency. The Smithsonian–Roosevelt African Expedition took place from 1909-10, was sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, funded by Andrew Carnegie, and was charged with collecting animal and plant specimens for the Smithsonian's newly established Natural History Museum. Roosevelt, along with his son Kermit, and naturalists Edgar Alexander Mearns, Edmund Heller, and John Alden Loring, traveled through modern-day Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, and collected over 11,000 animal specimens and 10,000 plant specimens.

Brooke Dolan II (1908-45) was an American adventurer, naturalist, and book collector. Educated at Harvard University and Princeton University, he became a trustee of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. During the 1930s he led two notable expeditions to China and Tibet, collecting numerous specimens that he sent back for the Academy's collection. In 1942, during World War II, he was recruited to serve in the OSS (precursor of the CIA) and traveled to Lhasa with Illia Tolstoy (grandson of Russian writer Leo Tolstoy), searching for supply routes to China for the Allied Forces. During this time they established contact with the Tibetan government and met the 14th Dalai Lama--the first Americans to ever do so. He then joined the Army Air Forces, and the United States Military Observer Group in China. He died in 1945.