Our Amazing Birds by Robert S. Lemmon

Our Amazing Birds (Book Club Edition in Illustrated Dust Jacket)

Little-Known Facts About the Private Lives of 102 North American Birds, Illustrated by Don R. Eckelberry

Bibliographic Specifications

• Title: Our Amazing Birds: The Little-Known Facts About Their Private Lives
• Author: Robert S. Lemmon
• Publisher: The American Garden Guild and Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York
• Publication Date: 1952
• ISBN: None Issued (Pre-ISBN Era)
• Edition Details: Book Club Edition.
• Binding: Publisher's two-tone cloth hardcover with red spine and grey boards, black osprey illustration printed on the front board.
• Physical Format: Octavo-size hardcover, roughly 210 x 140 mm. Illustrated with 102 black and white bird paintings, including full-page plates.
• Language: English

Official Condition Report

• The Book: Very Good (VG)
• Exterior / Boards: The red cloth spine strip and grey front board are clean and bright, with no visible damage. The black osprey illustration on the front board is crisp. The head of the spine shows slight rubbing or fraying.
• Interior: The pages are clean and unmarked, with some light toning at the page edges. The binding is sound.
• Provenance: Rainbow-and-sun bookplate label reading 'from the library of James W. Gow' on the front pastedown, partly covered by the dust jacket flap.
• The Dust Jacket: Present and protected in a durable archival-type plastic cover. The jacket is toned, and the spine is sun-faded and tanned. The spine head has a ragged, chipped top edge. There are small chips and nicks to the outer edge and fore-edge of the front flap, creasing and edge wear along the top edge of the back panel, and light spotting and soiling to the back panel. Overall a used, worn jacket.

Synopsis & Historical Value

Our Amazing Birds, by Robert S. Lemmon, gathers 102 short chapters, each devoted to a single North American bird. The subtitle promises the little-known facts about their private lives, and the text delivers on it, covering habits, breeding, range and behaviour in an easy, warm and humorous voice written for general readers.

Each bird is accompanied by a black and white painting by Don R. Eckelberry, with a number of full-page illustrations. The book goes beyond the standard field-guide entry, offering readable stories about how birds live rather than only how to identify them.

This is the Book Club Edition, published in Garden City, New York, in 1952 by The American Garden Guild and Doubleday & Company. It is an attractive, affordable collectible copy for bird lovers, naturalists and collectors of mid-century nature writing and illustrated natural history.

Author Profile: Robert S. Lemmon

Robert Stell Lemmon, born in 1885, was an American writer and naturalist. His early books were about dogs, beginning with Training the Dog in 1914 and The Puppy Book in 1924, before he turned increasingly to birds, trees and gardening.

His later nature titles include How to Attract the Birds (1947), The Birds Are Yours (1951) and The Best Loved Trees of America (1952). In the 1950s he also wrote a series of National Audubon Society Nature Program books for Nelson Doubleday.

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