THE EDGE OF THE JUNGLE

First UK edition, first printing. Publisher's original green cloth with gilt titles to the spine, in dustwrapper. Illustrated with six plates in black and white. An excellent near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt bright and fresh. The contents, with a little offsetting to the endpapers and very light spotting to the closed text block edge are otherwise clean throughout and without inscriptions or stamps. Complete with the scarce lightly rubbed and nicked dustwrapper that has a couple of short closed tears without loss.

Eminent naturalist and world explorer William Beebe served as the director of the New York Zoological Society's Tropical Research Station in British Guiana (present day Guyana) in the years following World War I, during which time he kept extensive records of the wildlife in the Amazon rain forest. Edge of the Jungle collects twelve amusing and meditative essays by Beebe on the destructive and comical activities of army ants and their leaf-cutting vegetarian cousins, the flight of enormous bats, tarantulas and the hawks that hunt them, and many other fascinating forms of tropical life.