CLARK’S GUNNER’S DAWN, WITH AN ORIGINAL SIGNED ETCHING

CLARK, Roland Hanmer. Gunner's Dawn. New York: Derrydale Press, 1937. Quarto, original gilt-stamped red cloth, top edge gilt, uncut. $900.

Limited private-press first edition, number 606 of a total edition of 1000, of Clark’s hunting reminiscences, with an original signed etching as a frontispiece and 19 full-page plates of game fowl by the author (five in color).

"From his boyhood days, Roland Clark's lifelong passion was game birds, especially waterfowl. His illustrations of birds in their natural environment are astonishingly lifelike, even in his very early sketches. He was an ardent hunter and his art depicts game birds as the hunter actually saw them. So it is not suprising that hunters are his most ardent admirers" (Clark). "It has been said that he was often torn between shooting or sketching a bird, and as a result in a moment of indecision sometimes would lose both the bird and the drawing" (Russell Fink). Another avid sportsman, Eugene Connett, after studying the typography of Daniel Berkeley Updike, founded the famed Derrydale Press, with the intent "to reprint the very scarce early American books on sport which had become so rare that some of them would never be seen outside of a few private collections… and to produce a group of books on contemporary American sport which, because of their beauty, would be preserved instead of discarded in time." Without very scarce original glassine and cardboard box, as often found. Pencil owner signature.

A lovely copy in very nearly fine condition.