Manuscript Forestry Field Notebook.
Ann Arbor: 1908.
Price: $500.00
About the item
8vo. Black cloth-backed marbled boards bound at top edge notebook style, decorative ownership label mounted to upper cover; [61] leaves of which 51 have been filled. Boards rubbed with small loss of marbled paper to rear cover, some dustiness, occasional soil to textblock (as can be expected from the nature of the thing), else Very Good and sound given the notebook's heavy use.
Item #309281
Noted jack-of-all-trades Earle R. Forrest (1883-1969), photographer, cowboy, author, historian, and forester, began his career in 1902 traveling from his home town of Washington, PA, to southwestern Colorado where he worked as a hand at a cow camp, before travelling on to Arizona, where his enthusiasm for photography would yield hundreds of images of the Navajo population there.
Forrest would eventually return east, receiving his B.S. from Washington and Jefferson College, and enrolling as a forestry student at the University of Michigan in 1908. The present notebook, filled nearly to completion, includes the author's calculations, sketches, and exercises in a mostly legible hand. The exercises include mapping, valuation, and sampling (lots of sampling). Though Forrest would work in forestry for a number of years in Montana, he would eventually change careers to courthouse reporter and travel writer, as well authoring a number of books, both fictional and not, on the southwest. The present notebook, while its provenance is intriguing, is valuable mostly for its place in the history of forestry and its education.