Days Without Time: The Further Adventures of a Naturalist (scarce dummy copy)

NY: Dodd Mead, 1948. First edition. Hardcover. Very good/Good. A really interesting specimen: A hardcover "dummy copy" of this Teale title, neither a finished advance copy, uncorrected proof, nor excerpt. Instead it's meant to give the feel and flavor of the book, and may have been produced only for internal use at the printers and/or publishing house.

It consists of green cloth boards without title or any text on front or spine; photographic endpapers at front (but not at rear); then front matter including a half-title, title page, table of contents with zeros for page numbers, and one page of Teale's intro.  His intro runs on to a second page, but the remainder of that page appears possibly to be placeholder text and is hard to make sense of. The remainder of this book is black and white plates with Teale's photos, but they are awkwardly laid out so that there are blank spreads in the mix. Doesn't appear to include all of Teale's photos from the text, as the dustjacket advertises 144 photographs and there aren't that many here. This copy is about 60 pages total, and not useful to a reviewer in any sense: only to someone invested in the production of the book. The dustjacket appears to be made for a finished copy, with major offsetting at the spine which is designed for a thicker book. 

Days without Time: Further Adventures of a Naturalist is Teale's eleventh book (about a third of the way through his career). The subtitle suggests it's a kind of follow up to The Lost Woods: Adventures of a Naturalist, published two years prior. As the jacket describes, "With him, the reader leaves schedules and appointments behind, He lives under the open sky in these pages fresh from the out-of-doors. Sharing the author's adventures, we spend an autumn night with migrating birds at the top of the world's highest building, we find a while new world in a clump of grass and make acquaintance of a remarkable swimming cat." And much more, of course. This book received "mixed reviews" and perhaps was not a great commercial success, which may account for why it now appears to be uncommon. This dummy copy is no doubt very scarce, possibly unique.

A very good plus book with light soiling to boards and faint foxing to rear board. Interior clean. In a good only jacket with dampstaining to rear flap fold and several long tears.