1898 Antique Ornate Victorian Book WILD BEASTS & THEIR WAYS 1st Ed Big Game Hunt For Sale

This is the true 1898 first edition, single-volume Macmillan issue — not the later two-volume reprints, not the 20th-century rebindings, and not the common colonial reprints. For collectors of Victorian big-game hunting, African exploration, or Baker completists, this is one of the key titles.

a particularly handsome example thanks to:

• The deep burgundy cloth,

• The bright gilt tiger front board,

• And the strong gilt spine lettering,

• With the classic uncut / deckled fore-edges still intact (always a plus).

Let’s break it down.

Published by Macmillan & Co., London, with the full title-page date. The illustrated frontispiece is correct and original.

Sir Samuel W. Baker was one of the Victorian age’s most famous explorers — Nile expeditions, African game, Ceylon, and India — and this book is his huge retrospective on a lifetime of hunting lions, tigers, leopards, and basically anything that could eat you for lunch.

The gilt tiger is a collector-favorite. Many surviving copies have rubbed, dull gilt or grubby boards. Yours is significantly cleaner than most examples on the market.

Gorgeous. This screams “premium Victorian issue,” and yours hasn’t been aggressively handled or cut down.

This is where you really shine — this copy is structurally sound and visually impressive.

• Cloth bright and vivid — better than typical copies.

• Gilt tiger bright with no meaningful loss.

• Corners show minor rubbing, typical for the era.

• Spine base shows a bit of fray, again normal and minimal.

• Spine gilt almost fully intact (rare).

• Board edges crisp, no warping.

Overall: Very Good+, edging toward Near Fine for the binding.

• Endpapers show paste-down offsetting from previous labels (normal).

• No cracked hinges visible — tight binding.

• Some scattered foxing, especially to title page — completely expected in Macmillan books of this era.

• Plates sharp and intact.

• Paper edges toned, as expected.

• Text block tight with no signs of mishandling.

Interior Grade: Very Good with strong structural integrity.

Sir Samuel Baker’s Wild Beasts and Their Ways is the ultimate late-Victorian safari in book form — a lifetime of close-range encounters with the world’s most dangerous animals, told by one of the British Empire’s most seasoned hunters and explorers.

Across Europe, India, Ceylon, Africa, and the American wilderness, Baker catalogs the habits, tempers, strengths, weaknesses, and murderous talents of the planet’s great predators. This is not armchair natural history. Baker writes as a man who repeatedly stood within a whisker of death — often literally — with nothing between him and disaster but a black-powder rifle, a steady hand, and nerves carved from teak.

• Lions: Their nocturnal stalking strategies, explosive charges, and the unnerving intelligence Baker observed during hunts across the Sudan and Abyssinia. Includes detailed accounts of lions attacking oxen, camps, and occasionally Baker himself.

• Tigers: Pages of firsthand encounters in India and Ceylon — tracking maneaters, reading pugmarks, and describing the terrifying stillness of the jungle before a tiger breaks cover.

• Leopards & Panthers: Baker emphasizes their sheer unpredictability — lightning-fast, silent, and more dangerous pound-for-pound than larger cats.

• Elephants: Not just hunted but deeply analyzed — their language, behavior, migratory patterns, and how their memory and intelligence can either save or kill a man.

• Wild Boar & Buffalo: Particularly dangerous, especially the “charge without warning.” Baker describes boar hunts on horseback and the near-impossibility of stopping a wounded buffalo.

• Crocodiles & Hippos: Night attacks on camps, river mayhem, and the hazards of hunting from canoes.

• Bears, Wolves, Hyenas: Encounters across Europe and Asia, each with its own set of hazards, tactics, and anecdotes.

• Firearms & Hunting Methods: Victorian rifles, cartridges, ballistics, shot placement — Baker had opinions, and he did not whisper them.

• Travel & Survival: The practical realities of 19th-century expeditions — disease, terrain, tribes, and the ever-present possibility of being eaten.

Baker blends:

• Natural history,

• Military-level field observation, and

• pulse-pounding adventure writing,

all delivered with the candor of a man who spent decades living where the food chain still had an opinion about him.

The result is a sweeping, vivid chronicle of the great predators of the Old World and the rugged humans who dared to walk into their territory.