A Short Discourse of Hawking

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This work is the third book printed on the sport in English and the first such written by a practicing falconer based on personal experience. Only a single copy of this work is known to exist, presently in the Wagstaff Collection of Yale's Beineke Library. As such, it is clearly the rarest printed book on our sport in the English language. The famed falconry scholar and bibliographer, J.E. Harting, unaware of its existence, failed to list this work in his otherwise exhaustive Bibliotheca Accipitraria (1891). It has never been reprinted. Certainly Sherley's work was one of the few books on the subject available to Thomas Morton when he set forth from England to become America's first falconer.