Description

St. Martin's Press [Published date: 1978]. Hard cover, 170 pp. First US edition. Very good in very good dust jacket. Black textured paper over boards with gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Front free end paper has a 1/4" mark in the top corner. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. Dust jacket has a few small nicks and tears and light creasing along the edges. Light overall scuffing and aging to jacket as well. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-library. NO remainder marks. Foreword by Gerald Durrell. Nice illustrations by Timothy Greenwood. [From front jacket flap] Buster is a young Paradise shelduck, who goes into a decline when his intended mate, Blondie, despite all expectations, spurns him. As it is in no one's interest, least of all Buster's, for this state of affairs to continue, Iain Grahame decides to play cupid . . . Buster is just one bird among many hundreds who live at a flourishing and rather unusual farm in Suffolk. Daws Hall is an international centre for rare and endangered species of pheasant, and a breeding centre for a very wide collection of waterfowl. It is also home for Iain, his wife Didy and their three children, as well as an irrepressible Dutch giant of a faun manager and an itinerant wildlife artist, Timothy Greenwood, whose pictures adorn this book and whose 'artistic' endeavours are not always appreciated by other members of the household. Iain Grahame's infectious sense of humour vividly recreates the ups and downs of this oddly assorted menagerie. His enthusiastic commitment to the conservation of rare creatures and their dwindling habitats makes compulsive reading.