My Woodland Home

First edition, first impression.  156, 16pp, with monochrome plate frontispiece and further black and white plate illustrations interleafed in text.  Emerald cloth-covered boards, gilt-stamped lettering on the spine. 8vo.  Cloth is a little tired, gently rubbed and rounded at corners and spine ends.  A little spotting and toning on text block edges.  Two gift inscriptions inked on front free endpaper, gutter ahead of half time a little strained else internally neat, clean, bright and tight.  

Cherry Kearton (1871-1940) and his elder brother Richard were naturalists and among the world’s earliest wildlife photographers who developed innovative ways of photographing animals in the world.  In 1895 they published the first natural history book to be illustrated entirely by wild photographs.  Cherry took the first ever photograph of a bird’s nest with eggs in 1892.  The brothers are perhaps best remembered for their 1898 book, With Nature and a Camera.  Kearton also took the first phonograph recording of birds (a nightingale and the song thrush) singing in the wild in 1900 and took the first film of London from the air in 1908 (and the first footage of hostilities in the First World War at Antwerp in 1914..