How to Avoid Being Drowned: Or, All About Flotation

viii, 104, viii pp, with line drawings and page decorations.  In bright blue cloth-covered boards, with black embossed decorations, gilt titles on spine.  Black endpapers.  12mo.  Boards a little rubbed and rounded on corners and spine ends.  Text block edges a little darkened.  Flat creased across front free endpaper, front hinge starting to crack, hint of toning in page margins, else internally neat and clean.

A treatise on, as the alluring title suggests, immersion of the human body in water and the avoidance of drowning through swimming, flotation and flotation devices or other means of technology, with some contemporary related advertisements at rear. Francis Wentworth Brewster was a trained lawyer called to the Bar in 1874 but he never practiced.  Rather he became an inveterate inventor, innovator and proponent of new technologies and devices.  The was a director of the Bouyant Appliances Supply Co and held patents in a wide range of fields including bouyancy devices, an improved golf ball, a screw propeller and improvements in warships, applications of metal plating etc. 

A very hard to find volume – the first copy we have seen in over 30 years of book dealing.