My Family and Other Animals; Menagerie Manor

My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell. London: Rupert Hart-David, 1956. First edition, third impression from the same year of publication. Publisher's green binding, silver lettering to spine, top edge green, plain endpapers; in price-clipped dust wrapper.  Slight bumping to spine tips, lightest cocking to spine, heavy foxing to edges and a little to prelims, inscription in pencil to FFEP; else fine. In a good dust wrapper, price-clipped, showing foxing to flaps, slight tanning to spine and a little nibbling to extremities. An exaggerated and sometimes fictionalised way of the years that Durrell lived as a child with his siblings and widowed mother on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935 and 1939, describing the life of the Durrell family in a humorous manner, and exploring the fauna of the island.

[together with]

Menagerie Manor, by Gerald Durrell. London: Rupert Hart-David, 1964. First edition, first impression. Publisher's orange binding, silver lettering to spine, plain endpapers; in price-clipped dust wrapper. With illustrations by Ralph Thompson. Slight bumping to spine tips, lightest cocking to spine, a few spots of foxing to edges; else fine. In a good dust wrapper, price-clipped, slightly grubby, light tanning to spine and a little nibbling to extremities with a short, closed cm-long tear to rear. A lovely collection of pen portraits of some of the creatures of Gerald Durrell's Zoo - and some of the lessons Durrell learned about making real and sustaining his childhood ambition of having his own zoo.

Both wrappers now placed in removable, protective sleeves of archival quality.