Kiel und Leipzig, Lipsius & Tischer, 1912. In two volumes. Large 4to (32.1 x 26.1 cm). xxi, 815 pp.; 48 lithographed plates. Uniform red buckram with gilt title on the spines. Edges speckled red. Original printed wrappers bound.

Rare original edition of the complete Cephalopoda collected during one of the major 19th-century zoological expeditions, on board the German steamer "National", to the Atlantic Ocean (1889). The ship travelled from Kiel in Baltic Sea westwards, north of the Hebrides to the southern tip of Greenland, then south past New Foundland to the Bahamas, then crossing the tropical Atlantic to the Cape Verdes and south to Ascension, back west again to the mouth of the Amazon, and north again to the Azores, the English Channel and back to Kiel. Because this was the first expedition entirely devoted to organisms floating or swimming in the open sea, many new discoveries were made and numerous new taxa were described. This part was written by the German herpetologist, malacologist and cephalopod specialist Georg Johann Pfeffer (1854-1931), and includes several new species. The illustrations are truly excellent. The 1971 reprint by J. Cremer is much inferior, being uncoloured, and in a smaller format. Provenance: pictorial bookplate of Einar Lönnberg "Labore Veritas" with an African elephant head and two swastikas on the front pastedown, and with a stamp of the American malacologist Richard Irwin Johnson (1925-2020) in the top margin of the front free endpaper rectos and wrappers. Axel Johann Einar Lönnberg (1865-1942) was a Swedish vertebrate zoologist and conservationist. "In 1904 he founded the influential journal of biology, Fauna och Flora. As a conservationist he worked hard for laws protecting waterfowl and reindeer. In 1922 he became an honorary member of the British Ornithologists' Union" (Wikipedia). It may seem more likely that the swastikas represented some mythical "Indian" symbolism rather than Nazi symbols. A very good, complete copy of this very rare work. Nissen ZBI, 4624.