GRIGGS, Robert F. The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Washington, The National Geographic Society, 1922.
Royal 8vo. Publisher's original ribbed cloth, small image of valley blocked in gilt to upper cover and lettered in gilt, map front endpaper; pp. xv, 340 + [1, advertisement]; fine folding photographic frontispiece of the valley, 233 illustrated photographs and 8 maps including 3 folding; a little fading to spine and light marking to cloth; otherwise a very good copy.
First edition. The author's exploration of the Katmai Valley and its region in the Aleutian Range in southern Alaska on behalf of the National Geographic Society. The expeditions led by Griggs undertook a five year study of the area's volcanoes, focussing on one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in history.
Arctic Bibliography 6208.
Provenance: Posthumous bookplate Brian Birley Roberts inside front cover, his signature obscured in white paint in the margin of opposite fly-leaf. Roberts, inspired as a child by reading Raymond Raife's The Quest for the Arctic Poppy (of which we have a copy as well), 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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