Wake-Robin

Very good hardcover. Non-authorial inscription on FEP. TEG. Brown cloth spine over green cloth-covered boards - beginning to fray at corners and some rubbing. Cover designed by Sarah Wyman Whitman. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1898. Wake-Robin was the first of John Burroughs' essay collections, and this is a lovely early edition.

From the preface:

This is mainly a book about the Birds, or more properly an invitation to the study of Ornithology, and the purpose of the author will be carried out in proportion as it awakens and stimulates the interest of the reader in this branch of Natural History.

Though written less in the spirit of exact science than with the freedom of love and old acquaintance, yet I have in no instance taken liberties with facts, or allowed my imagination to influence me to the extent of giving a false impression or a wrong coloring. I have reaped my harvest more in the woods than in the study; what I offer, in fact, is a careful and conscientious record of actual observations and experiences, and is true as it stands written, every word of it.