This book is titled "The Yankee Whaler" by Clifford W. Ashley, with an Introduction by Robert Cushman Murphy and a Preface to the Pictures by Zephaniah W. Pease, a first edition published in Boston and New York by Houghton Mifflin Company in 1926, and the limitation page says the book is one of sixteen hundred and twenty-five copies, of which one hundred and fifty-six are numbered and signed and contain an original drawing by Mr. Ashley. This copy is one of the 1625 copies, but it is not numbered nor signed by the author, and it lacks the original drawing by the author. The book is 1/2 bound, with gilt lettering and gilt devices on the spine, black lettering on the front cover, pictorial endpapers that feature sperm whales being hunted, the half-title followed by the limitation page, a colored frontis, the title page, a three-page Foreword, a Contents page, a five-page list of Illustrations, a two-page Introduction and two-page Preface about the pictures in the book, 121 pages of text followed by a long Glossary of Whaling Terms (from page 123 to 146), A List of Books Concerning Whales And Whaling (pages 147 - 149), an Index from 151 to 156, and colored and black-and-white plates that run all the way to the end of the book (page 379), and the top edge is gilt. There are 149 illustrations, plates, and diagrams altogether, including fifteen that are in color, and the chapters cover fisheries in Greenland, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and New Bedford, the whaler and whaleboat, gear used in hunting whales, scrimshaw and more. The book measures 11 1/8 x 8 7/8 in. wide, the spine is faded, with a loose binding and exposed gutters in front and back, and wear along the edges and at the tips; the pages, texts and plates are actually pretty clean, and an in-depth look at the whaling industry that was a first hand account written by a man who actually sailed on a whaling ship years earlier and a scarce limited edition that memorialized an industry which had seen its heyday - whaling was on the outs in this country, and this book was about a way of life that had lost its importance and represented times gone by - difficult times for the people serving on board a whaler, but a life gone by. #142 #1524