BAKER, J. A. The Peregrine. London: Collins. 1967.
8vo. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in the neatly price-clipped dust-jacket designed by Charles Raymond, lime green endpapers; pushing and light fading to spine tips, jacket a little rubbed and nicked to spine tips and corners, spine a touch faded; a near fine copy in like wrapper.
A sharp, bright first edition, first printing of this great work of British nature writing.
One of the finest, and most influential, works of nature writing in English, The Peregrine grew out of the author's decade-long fascination with the falcons wintering along the Essex coast. Structured around a single season's observations, the book follows these remarkable birds across the estuaries and marshes of an East Anglian winter, combining precise observation with meticulous, pellucid prose. A profound meditation on wildness, perception, and the limits of human understanding, The Peregrine blurs the boundaries between literature, memoir and ornithology, boldly anticipating the new wave of British nature writing that has emerged in recent decades. ‘It reads now, Robert Macfarlane has written, 'as uncannily prophetic: of the Anthropocene […], of extinction events, of dark ecology – even of virtual reality.'
SKU: 2124651