Big Trees of the Giant Forest: Sequoia National Park in the Sierra Nevada of California: Their Life Story from the Blossom Onward (inscribed to C. Hart Merriam)
SF: A.M. Robertson, 1930. First edition. Hardcover. A great association copy, inscribed on the first blank in the year of publication: "To Dr. C. Hart Merriam, with the sincere regards of Geo. W. Stewart, 1930." A scarce book, with no other copies available as of this writing, and scarcer still signed, as Stewart died just a year its publication in 1931. Merriam has signed lower on the same page with "Recd. May 26, 1930" and signed it again on the title page. George W. Stewart was born in 1857 in Placerville and became a journalist and the editor of the Visalia Delta newspaper in 1884. He is known as "the father of Sequoia National Park." See this tribute from Francis Farquahar. In the 1870s, Stewart began to editorialize about the need to protect the sequoias in the Southern Sierras, and in 1889 he began to lobby hard for a national park, networking with the likes of John Muir (see this later letter to Muir). Due to his influence, Congressman William Vandever drafted a bill that passed in 1890, a week before Yosemite was created, too. This is Stewart's only book. Merriam is best known as an ornithologist, mammalogist ("the father of mammalogy"), and the head of the US Biological Survey, but he also "stunned his colleagues" later in his career by leaving mammalogy behind to chronicle disappearing indigenous cultures in California though he had no formal training in ethnography. On the bottom of the second blank is the signature also of M. W. Talbot, who we suspect is Murrell William Talbot, once the Associate Director in Charge Range Research at California Forest and Range Experiment Station, Berkeley. This slender book details the life of a sequoia from start to finish. Green paper boards with a frontispiece plate of the Sherman Tree, turquoise endpapers. Two dozen black and white photo illustrations in the interior. Dedicated "To the memory of John Muir. Very good with sunning and the spine faded to beige, with ghosting to rear board. With the fragments of the original glassine jacket: flaps intact, but spine and upper portion of both panels gone. A wonderful association and scarce book. Very good / Good. Item #2213
Price: $5,250.00 save 5% $4,987.50