Baron in Africa

1st Limited Edition, No. 38 of 1000, 1997;  Safari Press, Inc., Long Beach, California. 1997.  Hardcover in Slip Case. Signed by the Author and Subject.  Octavo,    7 3/4" x  9 3/4”, xix, 290pp. Tan cloth boards with black titles and leopard to front, and black titles to spine. Decorative pastedowns and endpapers. Black cloth slip case. Decorative chapter headings and page chapter title borders. Illustrated with a photograph of von Alvensleben on the half title and with 28 pages of black and white photographs.

The  adventures of Werner von Alvensleben, one of the great hunters and characters of the African bush. Werner von Alvensleben (1913–1998) came from a long line of German aristocrats. Yet far from enjoying a privileged and pampered existence, his life plays like a Hollywood adventure movie. A former SS member, he was imprisoned in Zimbabwe during World War II and escaped by digging underneath an electric fence in the rain and making his way by foot to Mozambique. He became an agent of the Office of Strategic Services of the USA, with the code name “Dram”. There is a report in the OSS files of 1940-1947 “discussing the accomplishments of, and the debt owed to, Werner Von Alvensleben (Dram), Maria Sousa da Costa, and G. E. Dedek for their work in Mozambique.

”After founding the famous Safarilandia hunting company, he guided a list of hunting luminaries that included Jack O'Connor and Robert Ruark. This book recounts his career as he attacks a man-eating lion, kills a full-grown buffalo with a spear, and hunts for elephant and ivory in some of the densest brush in Africa. 'Adventure and experience were what counted to the man they call ‘Baron,’ not money or fame; indeed, in the end he left Mozambique with barely more than the clothes on his back."

Brian Marsh (1928-2014) “pioneering hunter” and author was born Ewart Pinker in South Africa. He took his step-father’s name when he was 6 and remained Brian Marsh for all his life. In the 1950s he started as one of the first professional crocodile hunters in Nyasaland, at what is now Lake Malawi. From that time into the mid-eighties the fisheries department issued unlimited crocodile licenses. An able hunter, he made a good living from selling the end with “Pondoro” Taylor and later greatly facilitated Peter Capstick‘s biography of John Taylor, the “Man called Lion”.As a staff contributor to Magnum Magazine from 1987, when his days as a professional hunter in various countries of Southern Africa were over, he was a well-known figure in the hunting community. His writing career took off in 1982 with a novel, titled “The Last Trophy”, which went into two reprints. He then settled for the non-fiction articles and books he is known for, drawing on his vast experience of hunting in Africa and the people he met over the decades. He is best known for his biographies “Baron in Africa”, and “The Hunting Blackbeards of Botswana”.

Condition: Near fine.