Author: Pfizenmayer, E. W.
Title: Siberian Man and Mammoth. [AND] 1909 Mammoth poster by the author.
Description: London and Glasgow, Blackie & Son, 1939. 8vo (21.7 x 15.1 cm). Frontispiece of a Siberian Mammoth, 268 [xii, 256] pp.; three folding maps, 29 mostly tinted photographic plates, numerous text figures. Original red cloth with gilt title on the spine. AND: Broadsheet (107.0 x 89.5 cm). = A well-illustrated work by one of the foremost authorities on fossil pachyderms, the German-Russian zoologist, palaeontologist, illustrator and explorer Eugen Wilhelm Pfizenmayer (1869-1941). These are the results of two expeditions to Siberia in 1901-1902, and 1908 initiated by the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Many photos showing the excavation of mammoths from Siberian permafrost. "Pfizenmayer worked for the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum from 1897 onwards. In 1901 he became a Russian citizen. In the same year he went as a taxidermist on the expedition of the Academy of Sciences led by Otto Herz (1856-1905), which examined the woolly mammoth carcass found on the Berjosowka in 1900. Pfizenmayer dismantled the carcass and arranged for it to be transported first to Irkutsk and then by train to Saint Petersburg. On the way he collected extant Siberian mammals for the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum. He also described the Yakut Laika. The Berjosowka mammoth has been shown in the St. Petersburg Zoological Museum since 1903" (cf. German Wikipedia). In this work, the author also described and illustrated some ingenious animal traps conceived by local hunters. Pictorial bookplate and label of the Torquay Natural History Society on the front pastedown. Edges a trifle spotted, the plates, and nearly all pages, however, clean and bright. An unusually well-preserved copy. We added a beautiful, large, chromolithographed poster of a young mammoth after a painting of Pfizenmayer, published in 1909.

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