That book, Pteryplegia, is a recent purchase. Derrydale, 1931, "No. 1 of 500, 200 of which have been coloured by hand have been printed by Eugene V. Connett at the Derrydale Press" I was damn lucky to get it. Dean
Dean and others: If you scroll up to the pictures Destry posted you will see that the frontispiece of Markland's 1727 poem is also the frontis of my
Parker Guns: Shooting Flying. The image is from my original 1767 copy of the book, which, believe it or not, I bought on eBay for less than I had paid years ago for my Derrydale reprint.
The term "Shooting Flying" traces to the title of a wood engraving in Richard Blome's
The Gentlemans Recreation (London, 1686), which predates the invention of the possessive apostrophy and is thought to be the first English language reference to the sport (and is the first known image). (There is a book in Italian from the 1580s that mentions shooting flying in text but no picture.) Blome's "Shooting Flying" is pictured on page 28 of my new book, the image being from my slide of the original in the rare book room at the National Sporting Library in Middleburg VA. nsl.org
"Shooting Flying" is an anachronistic term that by the 1800s in America, morphed into "shooting on the wing" and "wing shooting," which likewise are incomplete sentences, but fairly describe what's going on. "Shooting Flying" was distinguished by Blome in the late 1680s from "Shooting Sitting" (also pictured in my book), which we now call "ground swatting." EDM
