Claws, a fast-paced adventure tale of a young boy, Paul, lost in the foreboding terrain of Spencer’s Swamp, was written by South Carolina’s first poet laureate, Archibald Rutledge, for publication in an early twentieth-century boy’s magazine and was first collected in the privately printed Eddy Press edition of Old Plantation Days (c. 1913). It’s publication was limited to about 200 copies and the Eddy Press edition is rare and highly prized by Rutledge collectors.

Unseen by readers for a century, Rutledge’s mastery of outdoors storytelling shines through in every evocative word of a new edition now available.

A project of The Humanities Council SC benefiting the South Carolina Book Festival, a new edition of Claws is available, illustrated in handsome artwork in charcoal by Southern artist Stephen Chesley. Award-winning outdoors writer and noted Rutledge scholar Jim Casada provides the volume’s introduction, and retired South Carolina conservation officer and author Ben McC. Moise offers an afterword.