OP: The Chicken Book

Little, Brown and Company, 1975. Hardcover. Very Good. First printing. In 1972, two University of Santa Cruz professors—historian Page Smith (1917–1995) and biologist Charles Daniel (1933–2016)—bonded over an affection for chickens, so they decided to teach a class on the ubiquitous bird. It turned out, however, that they didn’t know much about them. In Smith and Daniel’s unorthodox approach, the students were “divided into small groups, each of which pursued a particular aspect of that remarkable fowl—the biology and embryology of the chicken, the chicken in art, in song, in folklore and literature, in its historic and economic and anthropological aspects, the history of the chicken, the keeping of ornamental birds, the history of cockfighting, the cooking and eating of the chicken and the egg.” This communal effort toward discovery culminated in The Chicken Book, published in 1975. Presenting the chicken from all the aforementioned approaches, The Chicken Book is a serious and enthus