Following the successful online sale of Angling Books, Doyle is now auctioning a selection of Hunting Books assembled by Arnold “Jake” Johnson (1930-2017) of Bozeman, Montana. The current sale comprising over 200 lots of books is being presented as a timed online-only auction on Doyle.com. Bidding will close on Tuesday, August 14 beginning at Noon EDT.

All of the books will be on public exhibition at Doyle on Friday, August 10 and Monday, August 13. Doyle is located at 175 East 87th Street in Manhattan.

The auction offers books covering all aspects of hunting around the world: big game, upland gunning, pig-sticking, fox hunting and still more esoteric pursuits. Big game hunting includes John Cyril Francis’s privately printed Three Months' Leave in Somali Land, published in London in 1895. Issued after the author’s death (and based on his diaries), it recounts the details of a very successful expedition.

A group of material pertaining to Theodore Roosevelt neatly covers both African and American big game hunting, both standard and scarce titles, and includes a very unusual prospectus for land on the Juja Estate in Kenya of W. N Macmillan, who had hosted Roosevelt on his 1909 African trip.

American field sports are represented by The Sportsman's Portfolio of American Field Sports, published by M.M. Ballou in Boston in 1855, this copy in the very rare wrappers. Also featured are several books with original graphics by prominent American game artists, such as Richard E. Bishop’s Etchings of Water-Fowl and Upland Game Birds and the special edition of Emerson’s Tuttle’s Fifty Prints.

A wonderfully obscure item includes two years (perhaps all published) of the Ferozepore Tent Club’s Log Book for the seasons of 1929 and 1930, detailing the various misadventures of a pig-sticking hunt in the last years of the Raj.

The fox hunting tradition is well represented, with G.D. Armour’s attractive color-plates in Humor in The Hunting Field, 1928, one of 100 copies signed by the author and with each plate pencil-signed.

A true bibliophile, Johnson was an inveterate collector of rare items related to angling, travel, expeditions in India and Africa, English sporting and color-plate, 19th century big game hunting, and Western Americana. His collection includes hundreds of rare books, hand-written accounts of hunting expeditions, striking examples of 19th century photographic travel albums, and elusive bibliographies and facsimiles of major works.

This remarkable and extensive collection, numbering in the thousands of volumes, is being offered an ongoing series of live and online auctions.