Knocking About: Being Some Adventures of Augustus Baker Peirce in Australia -- Signed "Author's Copy"

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924. 1st edition. Appears to be signed by the editor, Mrs. [Ethel Brigham] Leatherbee, who added "Author's Copy" below her signature. A posthumous memoir by Peirce of his adventures in Australia in the 19th century. Peirce (1840-1919) was born in Medford, Mass., and arrived in Australia in 1860 as a sailor aboard the Oriental. He deserted ship and swam ashore, embarking on a series of remarkable exploits during many years Down Under. At various times, he was a meat pie salesman, a purveyor of "Wizard Oil," a landscape painter, stage actor, ventriloquist and comic singer, photographer's assistant, snake hunter, gold digger, steamboat pilot and skipper. Illustrated by Peirce. xi, 176 pp. 8vo clothbound hardcover. Fair condition only. A well-used book that seems to have been read or referred to often. Worn and bumped at the extremities. Inner hinges cracked but still holding. Front panel of the original dust jacket pasted inside the front cover. Text pages generally clean with moderate age-toning. Signed on the preliminary blank: "[Illegible] Albert T. Leatherbee / Author's Copy." An imperfect, but unique copy. Mrs. Leatherbee was a distant relative of Peirce, who regularly visited and stayed with her family in his later years. She was an author, a civic leader in Boston, and a noted anti-suffrage activist. Along with the signature, there are a handful of small corrections neatly penciled in the text, and one news clipping pasted in at p. 110.