A Sportsman’s Scrapbook (1928)

A Sportsman’s Scrapbook is a collection of assorted hunting experiences from his childhood and early years. Phillips explains in a self-effacing manner, The … drawer in my desk has been bulging for some years with a variety of compositions which I have not the heart to burn nor the gall to proliferate. p. 3. This is the first of three popularly written books about his and other’s shooting stories. The other two are Classics of the American Shooting Field… (1930) and A Sportsman’s Second Scrapbook (1933) The assorted recollections are organized into twelve chapters as follows: early guns and hunting;. various shacks, camps, resorts, and shooting stands used over the years; grouse hunting guns, clothing, dogs; hunting chamois in the French Alps; hunting ducks at night; trout fishing on small Cape Cod streams; more trout fishing; hunting reindeer in Greenland; moose hunting; Currituck, North Carolina, waterfowl hunting; and bighorn sheep hunting in British Columbia.Several of these trips afield were unsuccessful but to Phillips that was not of much concern. Rather, he found great satisfaction in simply being afield in nature’s realm. Sketches by A. Lassell Ripley enhance the book. Oddly, in his early years, Phillips freely admits using some practices now illegal, such as hunting ducks at night and shooting over live waterfowl decoys and bait. At one point he goes so far as to write, I fear we were a long way, those days, from any developed consciousness of sporting ethics, and our chief pride was to see how many laws we could break at one and the same moment. –Henry M. Reeves.