The Book of Naturalists: An Anthology of the Best Natural History (association copy)

NY: Knopf, 1944. First edition. Hardcover. Very good. Association copy, inscribed on the front free endpaper: "Inscribed for Marcia Clapp with love by Will Beebe." Marcia Clapp [DeRocco] was an artist who sculpted a stone bust of Beebe that's now held in his archives with the Wildlife Conservation Society. She later founded the Pocono Art Center. Beebe was a preeminent and fascinating naturalist-writer, known especially for his ocean expeditions he conducted for the New York Zoological Society. This anthology is his selections of the best natural history writing, and it's table of contents lists a veritable who's who including: Aristotle, Pliny, Linnaeus, John James Audubon, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Ernest Thompson Seton, Donald Culross Peattie, and so on. See photos for full table of contents. Beebe gives short introductions to authors and rationales for his selections at the top of each essay/excerpt. Notably Rachel Carson finishes the anthology--as the only woman included--four years after her first book Under the Sea-Wind was published and before she came to fame. The book is dedicated to important conservationists Laurance and Mary Rockefeller. Octavo, green cloth, 500 pages. Second printing before publication. A very good book with rubbing to edges and corners, slight darkening to spine. Toning to pages, just a handful of pencil marks to a late chapter, and three dogeared pages near rear, otherwise the interior is clean. Lacking the dust jacket. A nice snapshot of the understood lineage(s) of environmental writing in 1944..