BRONSON, Wilfrid S. Paddlewings. The Penguin of Galápagos … Pictures by the Author. New York, Macmillan, [1937].
Square small 4to. Original illustrated cloth; pp. [xii], 106, illustrations in colour and black and white; spine a little faded, otherwise fine; from the library of Brian Birley Roberts (1912-1978) with his posthumous bookplate, and his signature, dated October 23, 1937 underneath.
Later printing (first 1931) of a fascinating and very uncommon (especially in this condition) childrens book explaining - scientifically correct - why there are penguins under the Equator, where they should not be. Bronson, natural history artist and staff artist with several marine biology expeditions, gives the evolution of the bird and the ecosystems that supported the migration and maintenance of the species. This title remained in print up to 1953.
Provenence: Brian Birley Roberts, inspired as a child by reading Raymond Raife's The Quest for the Arctic Poppy, became a Polar ornithologist, researcher anf the father of the Antarctic Treaty. 'While an undergraduate, he organized and led the Cambridge University Expedition to Vatnajokull in Iceland in 1932 and the Cambridge University Expedition to Scoresby Sund in East Greenland in 1933. Roberts joined the British Graham Land Expedition, 1934-1937 (leader John Rymill), as an ornithologist, spending the austral winter of 1935 at the Argentine Islands and, after an operation to remove his appendix, the following winter on South Georgia where he studied Antarctic birds and elephant seals … In 1946, he joined the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, as a part-time research fellow' (https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk).
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