Selected American Game Birds

Caxton Press, 1972. Hard cover. Very Good/Very Good. A 1" tear to dustjacket, with some edgwear. Twenty six reproductions in color of David Hagerbaumer's original watercolors representing twenty-nine bird species. Calligraphy by Sam Lehman. David Hagerbaumer (1921 - 2014) is known for his paintings of waterfowl and wildlife in landscape. Growing up in Quincy, Illinois during the Great Depression, Hagerbaumer hunted, trapped and fished with his father, uncles and grandfather to put food on the family table. Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, he began carving duck decoys in the late 1930s, and later began to concentrate on watercolor paintings. On weekends he sold his artwork in San Diego’s Balboa Park, until Ralph Terrill, founder of the New York gallery Crossroads of Sport, took him on. Their 1956 cataloge, featuring four Hagerbaumer watercolors with accompanying limited-edition prints by Frost & Reed of England, launched his national career. These sold out, as did the following year’s waterfowl series and so on for decades, until the collectibles industry drowned itself in print runs of up to 2,000. They also offered his hand-painted ceramics of quail, woodcock, chukar, green-winged teal, grouse, snipe, and mourning dove, which are now extremely rare. His lifework also includes his books, Selected American Game Birds (1972), comprising 26 plates of 29 species in their landscapes, with the texts hand-calligraphed by Sam Lehman; his copiously illustrated autobiography, The Bottoms, printed in a limited edition of 250 by Amwell Press, in 1987; and Waterfowling These Past 50 Years—Especially Brant (1998), which celebrates a lifetime of hunting these black geese that frequent eelgrass-rimmed lagoons and shallow bays. He also illustrated books by Worth Mathewson, including Big December Canvasbacks (1997), Best Birds (2000), and Band-tailed Pigeon (2005).