This whaling book was written by Bjarne Aagaard and is titled "Den Gamle Hvalfangst, Kapitler Av Dens Historie", which means "The Old Whaling, Chapters of Its History", and it's a first edition published in 1933, according to WorldCat. The book was published in Olso by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, and it's in the original Norwegian. (Gyldendal is one of the largest publishing houses in Norway; it was founded in 1925 after the new owner bought rights to publications from the Danish publishing house of the same name.) Aagard (1873 - 1956) was a Norwegian shipping broker and author of whaling history. He went to sea when he was fifteen, visiting both North and South America before getting a job at a shipping office in Glasgow. By 1892 he had become manager of the firm's Greenock branch, then he moved to Hamburg in 1893, where he started his own company in the industry five years later. Eventually he branched out to Hong Kong, with offices in Kobe and Yokohama in Japan. He returned home to Larvik in 1914 to establish the Farristapperiet - a distillery - in the town and managed the business until 1920. When he retired, he devoted himself to writing about whaling and the history of Antarctica, and internationally, he pushed for Norway's interests in the Arctic Ocean. His bibliography of Antarctic literature from 1950 included 8000 entries, and his book collection became the core of the Whaling Museum's library in Sandefjord, Norway. The museum is dedicated to the whaling industry and is the only specialized museum about whales and whaling in Europe. Aagaard also collected and translated Persian poetry in his retirement. The book is 1/2 bound, with four raised bands and gilt lettering and gilt devices on the spine, marbled covers, beige patterned endpapers with the stamp of Paul Morin on the front paste-down, the illustrated title page, a one-page foreword, 143 pages of text, a four-page list of Illustrations, including a leaf describing the maps in the book, a Register or Index that runs from 149 to page 158, a six-page Bibliography, and an additional list of authors who wrote whaling books at the end. Aagaard also wrote a three-volume set of books that was a monumental review of Antarctic explorations from before Captain Cook's voyages to the Norwegian whaling explorations of the 1930's. The set was titled "Fangst Og Forskning I Sydishavet", or "Fishing And Research In The Arctic Ocean" in English. It was a major work on the history of whaling and exploration in the southern hemisphere, and a comment with the description of the set says Aagaard was opposed to the slaughter of whales, and the complete set with dust jackets costs a high four-figures to acquire. The book is 8vo. and measures 9 7/8 x 6 5/8 in. wide, with a weak hinge in front and a small separation near the half title, and the rest of the binding is tight, a damp stain on the front endpapers, otherwise the pages and text are clean, as are the plates and illustrations, the edges of the boards show wear, as do the tips, two of the tips are turned in, and two pages have a half-inch tear in the lower margin and one page has a two-inch chip along one vertical edge, and still a difficult book to find - there are no listings for the book on the rare book website we use or anywhere else online, so a whaling book by an authoritative author who had an eye for history and a devotion to the life of whaling that caused others to admire. #146 #1533