Zoo Quest to Guiana was published by Lutterworth Press in 1956, the first of several books based on Attenborough’s early BBC expeditions. The Zoo Quest series was conceived as a collaboration between the BBC and the London Zoo: Attenborough would travel to remote locations, film the capture of animals for the zoo’s collection, and produce television programs about the journey. The concept seems uncomfortable by modern standards — removing wild animals from their habitats for captive display — and Attenborough has acknowledged in later years that his attitudes toward animal collection have changed fundamentally.
The book itself is a vivid adventure narrative. Attenborough and his cameraman Jack Lester traveled by steamer to Georgetown, then by smaller boats up the great rivers of the Guyanese interior. The rainforest descriptions are fresh with the astonishment of a young naturalist encountering tropical biodiversity for the first time: the giant anteaters, the three-toed sloths, the hoatzins (the peculiar, clawed, prehistoric-looking birds that are among South America’s strangest species), and the caimans that surfaced in the river at night.
The prose style is already recognizably Attenborough’s — precise, enthusiastic, modest, and leavened with self-deprecating humor about the difficulties of filming in conditions that combined extreme heat, torrential rain, and equipment designed for English studios.
Collecting Zoo Quest to Guiana
First edition (Lutterworth Press, London, 1956): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$300
- Very good/very good: $40–$100
- Signed: $200–$500