Saga of the "Discovery

London and Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1938. First Edition . Hardcover. No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. 240 pages, indexed and illustrated. The book has been recased in library binding: marbled boars and green spine strip with gilt title and gilt Dewey number on spine. It sufferes form the usual library markings:cancelled stamp on the front end paper; small libray one on the title page; the back end paper has another cancelled stamp, library stamp and handwritten accession number plus the remnants of a date due slip and finallly a library pocket on the back paste down. Themaps on the end paper are missing, lost by the rebind as is the one titled '"Discovery's " First Voyage'. The fold out map and the ones cealing with the seasonal distribution of whales are present. The book has been read but remains a clean, unmarked and solid copy, for indeed the one advantage of library binding is that it is indestructible. First edition, not recommended for perfectionists. "The RRS Discovery was a barque-rigged auxiliary steamship built for Antarctic research. Launched in 1901, she was the last traditional wooden three-masted ship to be built in the United Kingdom. Her first mission was the British National Antarctic Expedition, carrying Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton on their first, and highly successful, journey to the Antarctic, known as the Discovery Expedition. After service as a merchant ship before and during the First World War, Discovery was taken into the service of the British government in 1923 to carry out scientific research in the Southern Ocean, becoming the first Royal Research Ship. The ship undertook a two-year expedition - the Discovery Investigations - recording valuable information on the oceans, marine life and being the first scientific investigation into whale populations. From 1929 to 1931 Discovery served as the base for the British Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE) under Douglas Mawson, a major scientific and territorial quest in what is now the Australian Antarctic Territory. On her return from the BANZARE, Discovery was moored in London as a static training ship and visitor attraction until 1979 when she was placed in the care of the Maritime Trust as a museum ship. After an extensive restoration Discovery is now the centrepiece of a visitor attraction in the city where she was built, Dundee. She is one of only two surviving expedition ships from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the other being the Norwegian ship Fram (not counting the ARA Uruguay, which survives and sailed in the Antarctic in 1903, but was not built specifically for Antarctic Exploration. " (Wikipedia)