One of the early steps in researching any subject is to search the Web. It is easy to fire up Google and type in ‘J.R. Miller’. This returns several thousand results. They included a couple of scientists and one Canadian book author, but most of the results relate to the legions of men populating North America who are denominated Mr. Miller Jr.
There were a couple of intriguing results. A certain J.R. Miller was
warden of Clyde Lodge in NY in 1884, 85 and again in 1891. While the time frame
matches, the location is wrong. This doesn’t seem to be our man especially
as the 1886-1887 Directory of Clyde lists a Miller James R., bottle blower of
30 Caroline Town of Galen, Wayne County, New York
The reference is:
www.rootsweb.com/~nywayne/history/clydedir2.html
However there were also some 413 references to ‘J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.’ Somehow I doubted that Dr. Miller had written a book on gamekeeping, but I persevered.
The book, it turns out, is a figment of Ed Zern’s whimsical imagination. Writing in the November 1959 issue of Field and Stream, Mr. Zern reviewed Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was then enjoying a revival.
This pictorial account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.