[LORD, WILLIAM BARRY; BAINES, THOMAS (1820-1875)]. Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life, Travel, & Exploration. London: Horace Cox, 1876.
Hardcover. Second Edition. Full cloth. Thick quarto (250 x 170 mm), pp. (iv), [2], [1], 2-734, [2 adverts]. Attractively bound in publisher's original green cloth, decoratively stamped titles and designs in gilt to front cover and spine. Bevelled board edges. Covers with blind stamped frames. Coated pastedowns and endpapers. Engraved title-page. Fourteen full-page illustrated plates Numerous in the text illustrations and tables. Printed by Horace Cox, London. Index to rear in double columns. Contents: I. Outfit to take abroad; II. Boats, Rafts, and Make-shift Floats; III. Working in Metals; IV. Huts and Houses; V. Extempore Bridges and Makeshifts for Crossing Rivers or Ravines; VI. Timber and its Utilisation; VII. Sledges and Sledge Travellers; VIII. Boots, Shoes, and Sandals; IX. Waggons and other Wheeled Vehicles; X. Harness and Pack Animals; XI. Camels; XII. Cattle Marking; XIII. Water, and the Sap of Plants; XIV. Camp Cookery XV. Fish and Amphibious Animals; XVI. Poisoned Weapons, Arrows, Spears, &c.; XVII. Tracking, Hunting, and Trapping; XVIII. Palanquins, Stretchers, Ambulances, &c; XIX. On Sketching and Painting under the ordinary Difficulties of Travel; XX. The Estimation of Distances and Hints on Field Observing; XXI. Hints to Explorers on Collecting and Preserving Objects of Natural History; XXII. Ropes and Twine; XXIII. Bush Veterinary Surgery and Medicine; Appendix; Index.
Condition: GOOD. Binding secure. Slight repairs to spine ends. Covers generally clean. Apparently lacking frontispiece but otherwise complete. Contents largely clean with just a few fox spots. Without bookplates or inking. Scarce.
Notes: Shifts and Expedients was first published in 1868 in serial form (of 17 parts), with the first book form published in 1871, a 2nd edition was published in 1876, and a facsimile reprint published in 1975 - all of these now uncommon. This is a bulky work involving Baines in a great deal of exacting preparatory work. He contributed the major part of the text and practically all the wonderful illustrations, some of which he cut on wood, having taught himself the art. William Lord and Thomas Baines intended Shifts and Expedients to be a wide-ranging manual of instruction on the art of surviving in, and enjoying, the great outdoors of the nineteenth century. Pooling their considerable experience of strange lands they produced an encyclopaedia of practical living for the aspirant explorer of a hundred years ago. Everything is explained: wagons and boats, horses and oxen, tents and firearms, hunting and fishing, observing and collecting, carpentry and metal-working, camping requisites, bush cuisine, medical improvisation, the best ways to cross rivers, to move heavy objects, to build huts. (Allibone 1018. OakKnoll Africana 6061).
