THE MAD HATTERS: GREAT SPORTING ECCENTRICS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. By Douglas Sutherland.

1987 1st edition. Square 4to (198 x 236mm). Pp208. B/w photographs and illustrations. Black boards, spine titled in silver-gilt.

Biographies of a number of nineteenth-century sporting men notable for their eccentricity. "Eccentricity is often regarded as an attractive and even an endearing trait but, ...it is often distance which lends the enchantment". Bad behaviour and money wasting on an epic scale, punctuated by equally epic feats such as walking across Canada in the winter and shooting 4,000 pheasants in a day ("Perhaps we overdid it today", George V).