Gregory Bateson. 
 
Dutton: 1979. Fourth printing. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. On the jacket are some circles of stain, rubbing along the curve of the joint on the jacket, and a couple of tear along the bottom. The stains bleed through a bit to the back panels. A small pen mark on the front flap. Some sunning along the tops of the boards. Wrinkled bumping on the crown and heel of the spine. Exposed bottom corners. A bend along the edge on the bottom of the front board. Some smudges on the text block. Text is clean. 283 pages. Inscribed by Bateson. 
 
Get away from numbers. Look instead at the crab's claw, the elephant's trunk. Make lessons of them, not as information but as foundation. This is Bateson's message, fleshed out in an interdisciplinary spectacle that made this book a sensation, and his point isn't a parlor trick but a plea: for us to not destroy the natural world, our thinking has to remember that (and reimagine how) thought is biological.  
 
"It was not the crudest, the simplest, the most animalistic and primitive aspects of the human species that were reflected in the natural phenomena. It was, rather, the more complex, the aesthetic, the intricate, and the elegant aspects of people that reflected nature... I was seeing there the roots of human symmetry, beauty and ugliness, aesthetics, the human being's very aliveness and little bit of wisdom."