Books

London; Jonathan Cape. 1951. 8vo. Original cherry red cloth with vignette in blind to upper board, lettered in silver to spine, top edge red, preserved in pictorial red dustwrapper; pp. [x], 11-215; with a couple of diagrams in the text; previous owner's signatures to front endpapers, a very fresh copy, both externally and internally, protected by the unclipped, dustwrapper (10s. 6d.) with a little chipping to upper edge and extremities; scarce. First edition. White's classic account of his struggle to train a goshawk has begun to be rediscovered after featuring heavily in Helen MacDonald's Costa Award-winning H is for Hawk (2014). She points out that White's book is as much a psychological drama as a book on falconry, and also identifies many ways in which his experiences with the hawk fed into his writing of The Once and Future King; White comes to resemble his hawk just as the young Arthur is transformed into a merlin. Although highly regarded by falconers, this book never became a bestseller, and is consequently difficult to find in nice condition.

The Goshawk is a book by T. H. White, a British author best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King. In this work, White describes his attempt to train a Northern Goshawk using traditional falconry techniques. The book is a reflective account of the struggles and successes he encountered, and it has been praised for its introspective and literary prose as well as its exploration of the relationship between man and nature.