Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

8vo. 2 folding maps. Original green cloth (mild sunning to spine, wear along spine tail, rubbing at upper front board). Provenance: The Cavalry Club of London (institutional bookplate), now the Cavalry and Guards Club. 

FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE WITHOUT THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE. Thomas Griffith Taylor was an Australian geologist and student of T. W. Edgeworth Taylor who accompanied Shackleton to the Antarctic in 1907–09. During the Scott expedition he was considered its wittiest member. He achieved renown as a geologist in his own right. Cherry-Garrard wrote, “His tongue wagged, and the arguments he led were legion. The hut was a merrier place for his presence.” The work contains a great deal of information about the geological and glaciological work: Taylor's emphasis on the scientific aspects of the expedition made the book less popular than the other Scott narratives, making it the scarcest firsthand narrative of the expedition. 

In the second issue, a leaf with the Author’s Preface was newly inserted between pp. iv–v (numbered iv*-iv**), with an apology by editor Leonard Huxley, who had edited Scott’s Last Expedition, for inadvertently omitting it. Rosove 324.A1; Spence 1183; Taurus Collection 81.