Fine Bird Books 1700-1900

H. F. & G. Witherby, London, first edition thus, 1990. Cloth, 4to, 31 cm,. xi, 180 pp, 52 colour plates. A reduced-size reprint of Sitwell's famous volume. From the blurb: "This lavishly illustrated, impeccably researched volume is a tribute to the world's greatest natural history monographs. ..Here are the works of John James Audubon, John Gould, and Edward Lear. Also represented and distinguished for the superb craftsmanship and refinement of their print-making are works by the German master Joseph Wolf; French artists Jacques Barraband, Edouard Traviès, and Jean Audebert; and the great Dutch ornithologist Coenraad Temminck. No less impressive are the works of Mark Catesby, Alexander Wilson, and Daniel Elliot, Americans who have been overshadowed by Audubon. Many of the prints are reproduced here for the first time since they were originally published. Across the pages of this book eagles and falcons soar, parrots and toucans strut, hummingbirds hover, and all manner of waterfowl preen. However exotic or commonplace the bird, these portraits vividly capture its spirit. Exquisitely reproduced and chronologically arranged, the fifty-two color plates reveal the extraordinary breadth of achievement attained during the two centuries treated. More than a stunning visual record, Fine Bird Books is a collector's guide to fine prints and colorplate books. The ultimate tool for the collector, its comprehensive, scholarly bibliography rates the value of hundreds of the most sought-after prints ever made. Sitwell's illuminating text sets the scene, an age when the natural sciences became a consuming passion and the urge to discover, name, and picture new plants and animals produced a great wealth of illustrated books. With charm and erudition, Sitwell explains the confluence of events that made the colorplate books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries possible. This new edition of Fine Bird Books, which was originally published thirty-five years ago in London in a limited edition, includes an introduction by Handasyde Buchanan and a foreword by S. Dillon Ripley of the Smithsonian Institution. Fine in a dustwrapper which is sunned around the spine but otherwise Fine.