This book is titled "My Hunting Sketch Book", written and illustrated by Lionel Edwards, R.I., and published in London in 1928 by Eyre And Spottiswoode Limited and in New York by Charles Scribner's Sons in the same year, with a five-page Preface, a Contents page, one page for a List of Plates, and fifteen colored plates with accompanying text, and the book is a first edition. (Edwards issued a second volume of his hunting sketches two years later.) The book is 4to. and measures 12 3/8 x 9 7/8 in. wide, with the original beige linen boards, a paper label on the front cover, blank endpapers with whimsical drawings and a label on the front paste-down from the Warrenton County School which says "This prize is awarded to Hauie Taylor for Drawing, June 7, 1930." The pencil drawings in the book are not facsimiles - we thought they might be, so we took a white eraser and strategically erased a couple of lines on one or two of the pencil sketches and they came off with the eraser, so they are not part of the reproduction process - and we believe they were actually done by Lionel Edwards. We compared some pencil drawings done by him from other books and believe they are from the same hand - and we've included photos of those other sketches for you to see, and we believe they are matches. There are fifteen pencil sketches, one for each colored plate, including the frontispiece, and they are a good case that the pencil sketches were actually done by Edwards himself. It's possible the book was actually owned by Edwards - the sketches are such a good match to the ones he did elsewhere - that we believe he may have actually owned this book at one time. Lionel Edwards (1878 - 1966) was a British artist who specialized in painting horses and other aspects of British country life. He is best known for his hunting scenes, but also painted pictures of horse racing, shooting and fishing. He provided illustrations for Country Life, The Sphere, The Graphic and numerous books. Born in Bristol, he showed a talent for drawing horses at a young age, an artistic trait which may have come from his maternal grandmother, who was a pupil of George Romney, an English portrait painter who was the most fashionable artist of his day - Romney painted many leading society figures, including his artistic muse, Emma Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson. Edwards became the youngest member of the London Sketch Club at the age of nineteen. After he married, both he and his wife both were enthusiastic fox hunters, and during his life, Edwards hunted with almost every pack in the country. His artistic output was remarkable: he wrote almost 30 books and illustrated many more, including editions of Black Beauty, Lorna Doone and The Black Arrow, as well as numerous private commissions. He became a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art in 1926 and the Royal Institute in 1927. His favorite medium was watercolor, although he used oils more in his later years. His work was also part of the art competitions at the 1928 Summer Olympics, the 1932 Summer Olympics, and the 1948 Summer Olympics. The book has a pretty tight binding, with light soiling and wear on the paper label on the front cover, light wear at the heel and crown of the spine and at the tips, and the plates and pencil sketches are very clean. The drawings on the front paste-down add some flavor to the book, and it is a great book about fox hunting in England, with pencil sketches that we believe were actually done by Edwards. Hard to beat that. #111 #1661