VEVERS, G. M. The Life Story of the King Penguin … illustrated by Erna Pinner. London and New York, Transatlantic Arts Co. Ltd and Pilot Press,[1945].
Small 8vo. Original illustrated boards with map paste-downs; pp. 31 highly illustrated in colour and black and white; remnant of wrappers replicating the design of the boards in separate envelope; a very attractive copy of a rare item.
First edition of this factual children's book, written by the superintendent of London Zoo.
Provenance: Posthumous bookplate Brian Birley Roberts tipped onto title-page, his signature in upper margin. Brian Burley Robert, inspired as a child by reading Raymond Raife's The Quest for the Arctic Poppy, became a Polar ornithologist, researcher anf the father of the Antarctic Treaty. 'While an undergraduate, he organized and led the Cambridge University Expedition to Vatnajokull in Iceland in 1932 and the Cambridge University Expedition to Scoresby Sund in East Greenland in 1933. Roberts joined the British Graham Land Expedition, 1934-1937 (leader John Rymill), as an ornithologist, spending the austral winter of 1935 at the Argentine Islands and, after an operation to remove his appendix, the following winter on South Georgia where he studied Antarctic birds and elephant seals … In 1946, he joined the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, as a part-time research fellow' (https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk).
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