Phillips, John C.:

$12,500 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

BOY JOURNALS 1887 - 1892. John C. Phillips was a noted American naturalist who published numerous books and articles on various topics, including hunting, animal husbandry, ornithology, and conservation. This privately printed, charming, and very rare account of his most important childhood experiences in nature was printed directly from his youthful journals (even including spelling and grammatical errors). The diary entries are from the first half of 1887 and summers from 1889 to 1891, spent by Phillips at Wenham Lake in Massachusetts, where there is now a nature preserve named for him.Phillips grew up in Essex County, Massachusetts, and was the great-grandson of the first mayor of Boston, also John Phillips, and a grandnephew of abolitionist Wendell Phillips. The experiences recounted here in the printed version of his diaries were clearly formative, as he spent most of his adult life exploring and collecting as a hunter and naturalist. Among his many accomplishments, he accompanied Robert Peary on his voyages to Greenland, he named many of the features of Glacier National Park, he published work on western wildlife, and he described numerous species of birds new to science. His expeditions to Ethiopia and Palestine both produced large collections of animal specimens that now reside at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.An extremely rare work. Heller notes: "Only 250 were printed and all but 50 were destroyed." OCLC locates only four copies, at Harvard, Duke, the University

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