1964 1st The Year of the Gorilla George B. Schaller Hardcover Univ of Chicago For Sale

1964 first printing hardcover of The Year of the Gorilla by George B. Schaller. University of Chicago Press. Dust jacket present, in protective Mylar cover.Before Dian Fossey became a household name, Schaller was already in the Virunga volcanoes on the Congo–Rwanda–Uganda border, sitting with wild mountain gorillas and writing down what they actually did. This is the book that took that fieldwork off the monograph shelf and put it in front of general readers.Schaller spent nearly two years in the field beginning in 1959. The scientific report was The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior. The Year of the Gorilla is the narrative companion: how the study was funded, why he chose Kabara, what it was like to live in a cabin on a mountain meadow with his wife, how he learned to watch a silverback without getting killed, and what gorilla groups look like when nobody is filming them for a nature special. Mothers, protective males, play, nest-building, and the daily business of a species that popular culture still treated as a movie monster.He also draws the line drawings himself. The book is part field journal, part travel account of East and Central Africa at the end of the colonial period, and part warning about poaching and habitat loss that reads less like prophecy now than like an early dispatch.Reviewed in Science and The New Yorker when it appeared. Original University of Chicago Press cloth, 1964. First printing.Jacket shows the expected vintage edge wear and corner rub, as pictured. Please use the photos as the condition guide. Books comes with protective Mylar cover.Ships Media Mail from a smoke-free home. Combined shipping available.