This hunting book is titled "A Sportsman's Scrapbook" by John C. Phillips and illustrated by A.L. Ripley, and it's a first edition that was published in Boston and New York by Houghton Mifflin in 1928. (The dates on the title page and copyright page match, and there are no other printings listed, so this is a first edition by Houghton Mifflin; it is also a first edition, according to WorldCat.) The book is bound in the original red cloth, with gilt lettering on the spine and an embossed image of a duck on the front cover, with blank endpapers, the half-title, an illustrated frontis of Boston Sportsmen from 1845, the title page, a Contents page, numerous black-and-white illustrations, and 212 pages of text. John Charles Phillips (1876 - 1938) was an American hunter, zoologist, ornithologist, and environmentalist. At a young age, he developed a great interest in nature, hunting, and fishing, and he attended Harvard Medical School and joined the medical corps when World War I broke out. Subsequently he published over two hundred books and articles about animal breeding, sport hunting, ornithology, wildlife conservation, faunal surveys and Mendelian genetics, and while his first publications focused on hunting and the outdoors, later he shifted his interest to studies on genetic issues in wild animals, as well as species protection and environmentalism. He also traveled a lot: in 1896 he went on an expedition to Greenland, he visited China to hunt tigers, and he traveled throughout the American West and Canada, and in 1900 he published short articles about his hunting experiences at Wenham Lake in Massachusetts, as well as his search for bighorn sheep out west. In 1938, while grouse hunting with a friend in southern New Hampshire, he suffered a heart attack and died. A. L. Ripley (Aiden Lassell Ripley, 1896 - 1969) was a prominent American artist known for his paintings and wildlife scenes of hunters and game, fly-fishing on pristine rivers, and plantation life in the Deep South during the 1930's and 40's. He was a fine draftsman who had an interest in drawing at an early age and went on to study at the Fenway School of Illustration before serving in World War I as a musician in General Pershing's marching band. When he was mustered out after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, he returned to Boston and continued his education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he received a scholarship which allowed him to travel and study abroad from 1923 to 1925, and his links to the great artists of Boston allowed him to become one of Boston's most distinguished artists. Some art aficionados claim his watercolors done in Holland and Venice reminded the viewer of John Singer Sargent. When Ripley returned from Europe in 1925, he was elected to membership in the Guild of Boston Artists, and his first one-man show at the Guild in 1926 was a critical and financial success that established his reputation. This was followed in 1928 by the Logan Purchase Prize and Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago, which was the first of fifty prizes he would receive throughout his lifetime He was elected president of the Guild of Boston Artists in 1959 and held that position until his death in 1969, and his own paintings sell for five to six figures. An avid conservationist, he loved the outdoors and enjoyed hunting and fishing, and by painting and drawing en plein-air, his work has a freshness and spontaneity that surpassed most of his contemporaries. The book is 8vo. and measures 9 1/2 x 6 3/8 in. wide, with a tight binding, rather clean pages and text, and very clean illustrations. (Page 6 and page 9 have brown spots, and that's about it.) The spine is faded, with just the lightest of rubbing at the edges of the front board, at the heel and crown of the spine and at the tips, and overall in very good condition. See also Bill McBride's A Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions, published in West Hartford, CT. #123 #1599