ANIMAL SAFARI - Big Game in South West Africa (1956)

Publisher's orange hardcover binding with illustrated dust jacket.

xii + 212pp. Illustrated with 4 coloured plates and 32 monochrome halftone plates. First English edition translated by Oliver Coburn.

Binding tight. Contents clean with only a contemporary gift inscription on the front endpaper. Jacket has some age-associated edge wear and is price clipped.

'Lutz Heck, for many years Director of the Berlin Zoo, went out with his wife, Eva, to photograph and collect animals in South West Africa. He returned with a veritable Noah's Ark.

His expeditions took him down the coast to Walvis Bay and Cape Cross, where he found a colony of seals, and then into the great game preserves, the Kalahari reservation, Etoshaland and the Kaokoveld. Weeks in the loneliness of untouched country alternated with visits to farms and settlements where man has come to terms with the near-desert. But the real characters of this book are the animals; the elephants which charged him, the zebras which led him on several false trails after the extinct Quagga, and, above all, the lions which he photographed at night by flash-bulb at a distance of eight feet.

Professor Heck has a fine sympathy for wild animals and he writes about them with the simplicity and insight that made his first book Animals My Adventure so popular. With his wife he found supreme happiness in his expeditions, and the reader is drawn into the interests, the excitements and perils they shared. A collection of remarkable photographs illustrates the book.'