Wild Turkey Drive: Christmas 1943 – Hoffman Phillip – Signed 1st Ed.

Wild Turkey Drive: Christmas 1943 – Hoffman Phillip. An extremely rare book, technically deemed a first edition. Limited to 200 copies, signed by the author and his wife. From the Mossy Oak Bottomland Book Club, “It is the first truly limited edition turkey hunting book, and written at a time when you could count the number of published books dedicated to wild turkey hunting on one hand. Consider that wild turkey populations were yet at record-low levels across much of the country. The tide was set to turn, with the Pittman-Roberson Act of 1937 creating funds for wildlife programs through gun and ammunition sales taxes, and the 1940 Federal Wildlife Restoration program bill passage. The Florida-Georgia line was one of few places in the country in the early twentieth century where you could find a drove of turkeys. With few exceptions, turkey hunting in that period of our nation’s history was a fall affair.  Without adequate means to preserve meat, winter larder’s were stocked in late fall. The gregarious flocks of turkeys provided challenging sport and excellent table fare for hard working Americans. Fall hunters today still employ many of the tactics used then. Food sources for turkeys were critical to locate–some busted flocks with dogs, and others pursued gobblers with great obsession. One of the traditions then was something most people would more identify with deer hunting, that being a wild turkey drive. Native Americans were known to drive game, even using burns to aid the drive, this having a peripheral benefit of creating early successional habitat for the next year’s brood-rearing.”

Although Phillip typically wrote his Christmas publications about travel, he and a number of his close friends assigned a certain reverence to turkey hunting. Notably, born in 1872, Phillip served in the Spanish-American War as part of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. In the book, Phillip tells the tale of a turkey hunt, starting from the night before and ending with the celebration of a successful hunt. A bonus quail story thrown in, too.

A couple B&W photographic illustrations. Illustrated soft cover, with turkeys in flight in forest scene printed in color on front. Staples at spine. Spine area fragile, with detachment at top staple and cracking and splitting along majority of spine edge. Edge wear, and browning along spine. Some marks on rear, possibly remnants of discoloration to patterned paper on which the cover was printed, or possibly patterned staining of some sort. Internally fairly clean, with an occasional blem, as well as more extensive marks on last page (blank). Good to VG condition. The book is exactly as pictured. Any questions, please ask.