The Survival of the Bark Canoe (inscribed association copy)
NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. First edition. Hardcover. A nice association copy, inscribed opposite the title page: "for Judy and Bob Belous, with all the best from John McPhee, inmate 144-22-5537, Crescent City, 1987." Uncommon signed, especially in the first printing. We are not sure we can explain McPhee's "inmate" inside joke, but the book was signed in Crescent City because Robert Belous was at the time stationed at Redwood National Park. Belous was a friend McPhee first made in Alaska as he wrote Coming into the County. He was an important figure with the National Park Service there in the run up to the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which Jimmy Carter signed into law in 1980, more than doubling the size of the National Park System. Belous began his career as a freelance wildlife photographer based in Jackson Hole, where he befriended and worked with wilderness leader and icon Margaret Murie. His association with her and the wilderness movement soon tipped him toward Alaska. He joined the NPS’s Alaska Task Force in 1972 first as a photographer, then became the “keyman” for the planning of the Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley areas (eventually a National Monument and National Park, respectively, totaling more than 2 million acres), and in 1975 began serving as the Alaska Task Force’s public programs and liason officer. In essence, he had an important and varied hand in the preservation of Alaskan lands. See this tribute for more about his career and influence. As liason officer for the NPS in Alaska, he would have been a key source and guide for McPhee in the writing of Coming into the Country, which was published in 1977 amid (and about) the push for the ANILCA. They remained friends over the years (as other inscriptions attest), visiting each other. Belous later worked in Redwood National Parks before ending his career as the superintendent of the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Louisiana.
Survival of the Bark Canoe is a fantastic book, one of McPhee's most formally adventurous, that explores the tradition of bark canoes: their making, use, and history. This is interwoven with a canoe expedition he undertakes with friends in the Maine wilderness, in the footsteps (paddle strokes?) of Henry David Thoreau. Brown cloth with gilt lettering to spine, the stamped illustration of a canoe on the front board. A fine copy in a very good of better jacket with toning/sunning to spine and the edges of the rear panel. One stray blue pencil mark, faintly, at lower left on front panel, which still presents wonderfully, and a small price sticker at the upper right corner of the rear panel
. Fine / Very good. Item #2156ISBN: 0374272077
More about the book:
"In Greenville, New Hampshire, a small town in the southern part of the state, Henri Vaillancourt makes birch-bark canoes in the same manner and with the same tools that the Indians used. The Survival of the Bark Canoe is the story of this ancient craft and of a 150-mile trip through the Maine woods in those graceful survivors of a prehistoric technology. It is a book squarely in the tradition of one written by the first tourist in these woods, Henry David Thoreau, whose The Maine Woods recounts similar journeys in similar vessel. As McPhee describes the expedition he made with Vaillancourt, he also traces the evolution of the bark canoe, from its beginnings through the development of the huge canoes used by the fur traders of the Canadian North Woods, where the bark canoe played the key role in opening up the wilderness. He discusses as well the differing types of bark canoes, whose construction varied from tribe to tribe, according to custom and available materials. In a style as pure and as effortless as the waters of Maine and the glide of a canoe, John McPhee has written one of his most fascinating books, one in which his talents as a journalist are on brilliant display."
Price: $625.00 save 5% $593.75