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xii, 198 pp; 48 illustrations. Original cloth. Top & bottom of spine rubbed, and corners of covers slightly worn, so I would call the book a Good copy. As for the dust jacket, it is worn and sunned, with a tape repair on inside of dust jacket. But at least the front flap of the dust jacket is not price-clipped! The dust jacket may have been supplied from another copy. First Edition. SIGNED BY GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON (on the title page). In his autobiography, Simpson writes about this book: "I then turned to writing a fairly short and not unduly technical book on general paleontology. This had been commissioned by a British publisher, but when I sent that firm the manuscript they returned it with a curt statement that it was not exactly the sort of thing they had in mind. I was daunted, but I tried it on Yale University Press, where they decided that it was exactly the sort of thing they wanted. That was Life of the Past, and I hope the British firm that refused it knows that besides hardback it went into two paperback editions, one put out by Yale and one by Bantam Books, and was also published in Spanish and in German. It had some good reviews, and one bad one by a British zoologist who objected violently to the illustrations, which I had drawn myself during that winter at Los Pinavetes. I admit that my drawings are crude and inartistic, but they have a certain amateur freedom that some people find attractive or at least amusing. What did annoy me a bit was that my critic had also illustrated some of his publications and that his drawings were just as crude and inartistic as mine, and moreover that he had the poor taste to die before I could point that out to him. The potential importance of that book was that up to that time there had been no book in English that was truly on general paleontology, that is, the background, the principles, the aims, and the significance of paleontology as distinct from mere systematic description of the various groups of fossils. There had been one such work in German, published by Walther in 1927, but I was not aware of it and it had not been translated. Years after my book appeared, a general paleontology (under that little) was written by A. Brouwer, published first in Dutch in 1959, and in English translation in 1967. Although Brouwer cited several of my other books, he did not mention the one that antedated his in the same field. Finally in 1971 appeared a fine textbook by Raup and Stanley, written in English at length and at a technical level, that surpasses previous efforts, including my shorter, less technical, and now obsolete work. They, too, cited other books by me but not this one. Thus in spite of its rather wide circulation, I cannot maintain that Life of the Past started the trend to consider paleontology as a general subject and not only as a complex of taxonomic specialties. Incidentally, Raup and Stanley also did not cite Brouwer's previous book on their subject or the historically important work by Walther (Simpson, Concession to the Improbable, an Unconventional Autobiography, pp. 156-157). Following in the footsteps of Raup and Stanley, Simpson's biographer Léo Laporte does not mention this book in his biography, George Gaylord Simpson Paleontologist and Evolutionist (2000)!" NOTE: This copy is for someone who wants a signed copy and does not care that much about the condition of the dust jacket. But if you want photos of the dust jacket that show its wear, I can supply them, on request. Seller Inventory # 17323
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Bibliographic Details
Title: Life of the Past. An Introduction to ...
Publisher: New Haven: Yale University Press/ London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1953.
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good
Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
Signed: Signed by Author(s)
Edition: 1st Edition
