The London Zoo

This short illustrated history follows the Zoological Society of London from its founding in the 1820s as a private scientific menagerie in Regent's Park to the public zoo that later drew paying crowds. Holloway traces the buildings, keepers, and famous animals, the tension between research and spectacle, and the Victorian appetite for elephants, big cats, and exotic birds. Period prints and photographs show visitors as well as cages. The book is a compact institutional history of one urban zoo, not a treatise on zoology and not a guide to present-day enclosures.

Bound in brown glazed paper printed in colour. Endleaves printed in brown. Eight leaves of colour reproductions from 1835 to 1882. No jacket or slipcase. Folio miniature -michael Joseph in association with the Folio Press.