APPENDIX E 
THE PIGSKIN LIBRARY 
I have received so many inquiries about the “pigskin library” (as the 
list appeared in the first chapter of my African articles in “Scribner’s 
Magazine”), and so many comments have been made upon it, often in 
connection with the list of books recently made public by ex-President 
Eliot, of Harvard, that I may as well myself say a word on the subject. 
In addition to the books enumerated as belonging to the library, 
various others were from time to time added; among them, “Alice in 
Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” Dumas’s “Louves de 
Machekoule,” “Tartarin de Tarascon ” (not until after I had shot my 
lions!), Maurice Egan’s “Wiles of Sexton Maginnis,” James Lane Allen’s 
“Summer in Arcady,” William Allen White’s “A Certain Rich Man,” 
George Meredith’s “Farina,” and d’Aurevilly’s “Chevalier des Touches.” 
I also had sent out to me Darwin’s “Origin of Species” and “Voyage 
of the Beagle,” Huxley’s Essays, Frazer’s “Passages from the Bible,” 
Braithwaite’s “Book of Elizabethan Verse,” FitzGerald’s “Omar Khay¬ 
yam,” Gobineau’s “ Inegalite des Races Humaines” (a well-written book, 
containing some good guesses; but for a student to approach it for serious 
information would be much as if an albatross should apply to a dodo 
for an essay on flight), “Don Quixote,” Moliere, Goethe’s “Faust,” 
Green’s “Short History of the English People,” Pascal, Voltaire’s “Siecle 
de Louis XIV,” the “Memoires de M. Simon” (to read on the way home), 
and “The Soul’s Inheritance,” by George Cabot Lodge. Where possible 
I had them bound in pigskin. They were for use, not ornament. I almost 
always had some volume with me, either in my saddle-pocket or in the 
cartridge-bag which one of my gun-bearers carried to hold odds and ends. 
Often my reading would be done whilst resting under a tree at noon, per¬ 
haps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for 
camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get 
water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, 
sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings would either have 
vanished or become loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a 
well-used saddle looks. 
Now it ought to be evident by a mere glance at the complete list both 
that the books themselves are of unequal value and also that they were 
chosen for various reasons, and for this particular trip. Some few of 
them I would take with me on any trip of like length; but the majority I 
should of course change for others—as good and no better—were I to 
start on another such trip. On trips of various length in recent years I 
have taken, among many other books, the “Memoirs of Marbot,” iEschy- 
