Arcana:

(BEARD, PETER). Beard, Peter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2004. First Edition. 8vo. Gilt-Debossed Boards in Jacket. Photography Monograph. Fine/Fine. 158pp, profusely illustrated in color and b&w. "From adventurer, explorer, photographer, writer, pied piper Peter Beard come eleven irresistible tales told to his daughter Zara in his tented encampment at Hog Ranch, Kenya, about life, about living, about Africa. He writes of the East African hills he came to know so well over four decades, where time slows to infinity in a great bottomless, bottle green underwater world . . . about Nairobi in the 1950s, still a quaint, eccentric pioneer town, full of characters of all stripes and tribes, where rhinoceros roamed the streets and local residents went to the movies in pajamas. He writes of the camp he built twelve miles outside of Nairobi so that he would never be off safari, a forty-acre patch of bush called Hog Ranch (abutting Karen Blixen’s plantation), named for the families of warthogs who wandered into camp, a camp populated with waterbuck, suni, dik-diks, leopard, giraffe, and occasionally lion and buffalo. He writes of his quest to photograph overpopulated and habitat-destroying elephants for Life magazine on the eve of Kenya’s independence . . . of his close encounter with the legendary man-eating lions of "Starvo" (descendants of the famed beasts rumored to be immune to bullets, who in the late nineteenth century halted the construction of the Mombasa railroad, devouring railroad workers and snatching sleeping passengers from their Pullman berths in the dead of night to make a meal of them), who charged the author, "coming in slow motion, like a bullet train erupting out of a tunnel, soundless, like an ancient force." He tells of his round-the-clock adventure tracking and studying crocodiles with a game warden / biologist at Lake Rudolf, a tale that begins with one crew member being grabbed from behind by a ten-foot crocodile and another doing battle with an almost prehistoric monster fish - a 200-pound Great Nile perch! . . . and he writes of the final wildlife encounter that ended his safari days, an incident that proved Karen Blixen’s motto: "Be bold, be bold . . . be not too bold." "Zara’s Tales" confirms to our constant surprise and delight that "nothing out of the ordinary happens. It’s just Africa, after all." A brand new, most handsome example of the 2004 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. first edition of this charming and informative memoir for readers young and old copiously illustrated with Beard's African photographs and drawings. 0-679-42659-0 Inventory Number: 026345