An extravagant privately produced publication documenting a big game hunting trip to the Arctic, one of only 50 copies.
This lavishly illustrated publication was intended as a keepsake for friends of the author, Rudolf Ritter von Gutmann (1880-1966). A banker by trade, von Gutmann inherited great wealth from his Austrian industrialist father, and lived a life of cultivated refinements. The quality of the production speaks to his bibliophilic tendencies, clearly with no expenses spared in anything from the binding by Ferdinand Bakala, official binder to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to the 87 state of the art heliogravure plates prepared by Munich graphics company Pick Und Co., after photographs by the author.
Following transatlantic passage from Austria, von Gutmann and his team of four began their expedition by train to Seattle in July 1909. Here he chartered a Norwegian steamer, Transit, to take them further north to Juneau, through the Aleutian Islands, into the Bering Sea, to Nome, then west to the Anadyr River estuary on the Siberian coast, south to the Kamchatka Peninsula and then back again, cruising down the coast of Alaska.
The text comprises extracts from von Gutmann’s diary, and gives a lively and at times poetic narrative to accompany the profuse illustrations. Although very much a big game hunting expedition, appreciations of the scenery and ethnographic observations are interspersed with vivid hunting stories. The party’s kills are enumerated at the end of the volume and comprise: 2 bull moose, 17 walruses, 3 sea lions, 1 bear, 4 caribou, 2 Alaskan dall rams, 1 Kamchatka snow sheep, 2 American bald eagles and a great number of swamp and water fowl, grouse and porcupines. The illustrations show coastal views, indigenous people, and wildlife both in situ and as prizes.
Alongside the author, the exclusive expedition comprised four other members, all local to Gutmann’s 120,000 acre estate in Kalwang, Austria. They were superintendent Karl Sprosec, physician Dr. Mitter, secretary Robert Mahler and an unnamed servant, described as a Kallwanger hunter.
OCLC finds three copies only of this book in institutional collections at the University of Alaska, UC Berkeley and Staatsbibliotek zu Berlin.
