1937 Gunner's Dawn by Clark, Roland - Derrydale Press #159/950 Signed Etching

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Hardcover First Edition Maroon faux leather with gilt rules, titles & decoration; 8vo; 125pp; top edge gilt, others untrimmed; illustrated … Read more Hardcover First Edition Maroon faux leather with gilt rules, titles & decoration; 8vo; 125pp; top edge gilt, others untrimmed; illustrated with a pencil-signed original etching as frontispiece, title page decorations in red, 5 color plates plus 14 plates in black & white; limited to 950 numbered (#159) copies. One of the Derrydale high spots. Tales of gunning waterfowl throughout North America by one of the country's most-talented sporting artists.

From his boyhood days, Roland Clark's lifelong passion was game birds, especially waterfowl. His illustrations of birds in their natural environment are astonishingly life like, 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. "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 the very scarce original glassine dust jacket and cardboard box, as often found.

A lovely copy in very good condition. Buy for ONLY $116 with a Chairish coupon! See less