The Bird Fancier

\'Birds have always fascinated me, \' writes Alastair Morrison in this charming memoir of a young man making his way in the world in the 1930s and 1940s. \'As long as I can remember they have excited my interest and imagination, beautiful creatures and great travellers, making great journeys to and from far parts of the world.\' The Bird Fancier is an engaging account of the author\'s own travels through Britain, Scandinavia, Iceland, Europe, South America and Asia, in search of bird specimens for the British Museum and live birds for the London Zoo. Along the way he also collects a rich store of anecdotes about the remarkable range of people he encounters, from the small to the great - including the poet W. H. Auden, who published a photograph of Morrison in a book that he later wrote about Iceland. Morrison\'s uncommon aptitude for friendship, his bowerbird habit of collecting, and his mildly self-effacing humour conspire to breathe vigour into a narrative which reveals a self-possessed young man with a profound gift for graciousness. \'One thing strikes me above all else, \' Morrison wrote in the preface to a private edition of this book published in 1993, \'the extraordinary amount of kindness from people in every walk of life, kindness that was often undeserved and unrequited, that I have been privileged to enjoy.\' Pandanus Books is privileged to bring to a wider audience this delightful record of Alastair Morrison\'s journey through a 20th-century world plunging irrevocably towards another global conflict - a journey that took him back to Peking, the city of his birth, where he was to meet the love of his life.