This book is titled "Instructions To Young Sportsmen, On The Choice, Care, And Management Of Guns; Hints For The Preservation Of Game; Directions For Shooting Wildfowl; &c. &c. &c. With Concise Abridgment of the Principal Game Laws", by P. Hawker, Esq. The Second Edition, With Explanatory Plates, Considerably Enlarged And Improved. The book was printed in London in 1816 by C. Wood for R. Hunter and J. Ridgway and Sons. The book is 3/4 bound, with five raised bands, six compartments with gilt lettering and horizontal gilt-ruled lines on the spine, blue marbled covers, light brown endpapers with the bookplate of Syston Park and a smaller oval plate with the initials of Syston Park, a great luminescent aquatint done Peter Hawker as the frontispiece, then the title page, a two-page advertisement for the Second Edition, four pages of Contents, and 324 pages of text followed by a 22-page Index at the rear. The book also has six plates, which include a check collar, a gunning punt, and a poole canoe with directions for building it, and a list of Gunmakers in London before the first page of the text. The first edition was published in 1814 and written by British soldier and sportsman Lt. Col. Peter Hawker (1786 - 1853). He was educated at Eton and entered military service in 1801 by purchasing a commission in the Royal Dragoons; he even purchased a promotion to captain when he was just seventeen years old, but in his diary, noted that he paid for it "dearer than anyone in the service" - he was wounded at the Battle of Talavera in 1809 and declared unfit for service; the Battle of Talavera was part of the British fight against Napoleon, and after being wounded, he resigned and sold his commission. Later on, he accepted a commission as major of the North Hampshire Militia and was made a lieutenant-colonel in 1821 and ultimately deputy lieutenant for his county - the fighting with Napoleon was long over, and all this kept him safe and off the front lines of battle after his wounds. Hawker kept a regular diary which contained observations of Europe during the Napoleonic wars and notes about wild-fowling, game-bird shooting, and hunting, and his diary, printed in an abridged form, became a popular work. The first edition did not credit him as the author and was printed in small numbers, primarily for his friends, and it had no plates or illustrations, to keep down the cost of publication, and still it went through nine impressions during his lifetime. He was also a marksman and one of the great shots of the nineteenth century, and his sporting exploits and writings were widely followed during his lifetime and became classics of the genre. Hawker helped with the development of "detonating" firearms - the percussion lock and punt gunning - and he designed a breech-loading swivel gun mounted on a four-wheeled carriage. He also designed a "military musket" and commissioned the manufacture of several prototypes at his own expense; Hawker's musket design was favorably received by the Board of Ordnance, but was not adopted, because the Board preferred the Enfield Rifle, although elements of Hawker's design were incorporated into the final version of the Enfield. Syston Park is a locality in Lincolnshire, England, a few miles north of Grantham. Sir John Thorold, 9th Baronet (1734- 1815), was a British book collector and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1779 to 1796; he built a library at Syston Park which included a first edition folio of Shakespeare, and he was succeeded in the baronetcy by his son, John, who extended the library collection. The book is 8vo. and measures 9 3/4 x 6 1/4 in. wide, and has condition issues on the spine, but is in very good condition otherwise. The binding is a bit loose in front, the spine has a small chip at the crown and a larger chip in the first compartment, with wear at the edges of the spine and at the heel and at the tips, and the rest of the binding is very tight. The pages and text are very clean, with light offset on a couple of pages from the plates, and light brown spots on the blank endpapers at the rear. The book is also very rare - we found only three copies of the second edition listed for sale online and only four first editions listed for sale, and they command good prices, as should be expected for this classic about guns and hunting, and the book has the plates and illustrations that are lacking in the first edition. #113 #1654