Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel & Exploration (1876 2nd Edition Hardcover)

This was published in seventeen parts, and is a guide to travellers, explorers, and settlers, founded on the experiences of the authors, and referring incidentally to South Africa. Wallis (J.P.R.) Thomas Baines, second edition, Cape Town 1976, pages 157-8. 'Apparently through the undertaking (the publication of Nature and Art) he came to know an ex-artillery officer, W.B. Lord, who had travelled in Canada and Asia and now proposed that he and Baines should collaborate to put out a travellers' handbook, something on the lines of Galton's Art of Travel. It was a bulky work of some eight hundred quarto pages issued serially towards the end of 1868, and involved Baines in a great deal of exacting preparatory work. He contributed the major part of the text and practically all the illustrations, some of which he cut on wood, having taught himself the art.' 'William Lord and Thomas Baines intended Shifts and Expedients to be a wide-ranging manual of instruction on the art of surviving in, and enjoying, the great outdoors of the nineteenth century. Pooling their considerable experience of strange lands they produced an encyclopaedia of practical living for the aspirant explorer of a hundred years ago. Everything is explained: wagons and boats, horses and oxen, tents and firearms, hunting and fishing, observing and collecting, carpentry and metal-working, camping requisites, bush cuisine, medical improvisation, the best ways to cross rivers, to move heavy objects, to build huts. The work is lavishly illustrated with wood-engravings by Baines. Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography Vol. 1.

Hardcover. English. Horace Cox, London. 1876 2nd edition. 734 pp & 6pp ads at back, frontispiece, illustrated title page, 14 plates, numerous text illustrations, tables. Original somewhat scuffed green cloth over bevelled boards, front ep taped, with ownership stamp. Title page, facing illustration and title page heavily foxed. Page 455 is loosely inserted. Book No: 2501231