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Color Our Collections: The Art of Intaglio Printing

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This year for Color Our Collections, we’ve produced a coloring book with illustrations from books that represent the evolution of the art of printing. This week on our blog, we’ll explore the books featured in the coloring book and the printing techniques used for the illustrations.

You can download our 2017 Color Our Collections coloring book here.

Learn more about Color Our Collections here.

The Art of Intaglio Printing

In the Intaglio family of printmaking, an image is incised into a surface, usually a metal plate. Intaglio includes such familiar processes as etching and engraving. In engraving, the image is physically carved into a plate using special tools like burins. In etching, an image is drawn onto the surface of a plate that is covered in wax. The stylus, used to draw the lines in the wax, exposes the metal of the image lines. The plate is then dipped in an acid bath. The acid etches the exposed image lines but does not affect the portions of the plate covered in wax.

Intaglio techniques were used for book illustration by the latter half of the 15th century and became the standard for illustrating books by the late 16th century. Intaglio was used predominantly until around the mid-19th century, when lithography started gaining ground.

This video from the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design demonstrates the copper plate engraving process:

Catesby’s Copper Plate Etchings

In the early eighteenth century, English naturalist Mark Catesby set foot in a New World. After spending the better part of ten years, spread across two separate trips, exploring and documenting North America’s rich biodiversity, he would eventually publish his research and original artworks as the first fully illustrated book on the flora and fauna of North America.

Published over eighteen years between 1729-1747, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands contains 220 plates based mostly upon Catesby’s own watercolors, which he worked up based on sketches he made in the field. The final publication was illustrated with copper plate etchings produced by Catesby himself. Catesby also hand-colored (maybe not all) the prints as well.

Catesby’s work was also extremely influential to the work of Carl Linnaeus, whose binomial system for naming plants and animals is still in use today. Linnaeus cited Catesby extensively in his Species Plantarum (1753) and Systema Naturae (1758). For many of Linnaeus’ species names, Catesby is his only reference, and thus Catesby’s illustrations in Natural History serve as the type for many of Linnaeus’ species.

The first edition of Catesby’s Natural History in BHL, which was used to produce the coloring pages in this year’s coloring book, was digitized from the collections of Smithsonian Libraries. This copy is one of only a few known perfect copies of this first edition and the only one known to contain all three pieces of ephemera relating to the production of the work.

Note: This post was edited on 8 February 2017.

References

February 8, 2017by michelle.underhill
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

Color Our Collections: The Art of Woodcuts

View Full Size Image

This year for Color Our Collections, we’ve produced a coloring book with illustrations from books that represent the evolution of the art of printing. This week on our blog, we’ll explore the books featured in the coloring book and the printing techniques used for the illustrations.

You can download our 2017 Color Our Collections coloring book here.

Learn more about Color Our Collections here.

The Art of Woodcuts

In the woodcut printing technique, the image (and sometimes text) is carved into the surface of a wood block. A knife and/or chisel is used to remove the wood surrounding the image, so that only the image lines remain raised or flush with the wood block surface. The block is then inked and pressed against paper to transfer the image. The resulting image is a reverse of that on the wood block.

The earliest known complete and dated printed book, the Diamond Sūtra dated 868 AD, was produced using wood block printing. The work, a Chinese translation of a Buddhist text, can be viewed online thanks to the British Library.

This video from the Victoria and Albert Museum demonstrates the woodcut printing process:

The Woodcuts of Pierre Belon

Pierre Belon was a French naturalist who started practice as an apothecary, studied medicine, and later undertook many travels that fueled his interest in natural history. In 1553, he published De aquatilibus, describing over 100 fish, sharks, and rays, as well as many marine mammals. The work is illustrated with woodcuts, and some copies are also hand colored.

Belon details the outward characteristics of the species he depicts and classifies his divisions of aquatic animals by size, skeletal structure, mode of propagation, number of limbs, form of the body, and habitat. As such, De aquatilibus is considered by many to be the beginning of modern ichthyology. The work also includes detailed descriptions of dolphins and their embryos and reproductive anatomy, and thus it is also considered the start of modern embryology.

Belon stressed the importance of observation in scientific study and communication, chastising those who simply relied on and proliferated historic accounts stemming from the titans of antiquity. However, despite this charge, Belon does include some fantastical creatures within his book, including the “sea monk” and “web-footed horse of Neptune.”

Sadly, Belon’s life was cut tragically short. He was murdered by unknown assailants in the Bois de Boulogne in 1564 at the age of 47.

De aquatilibus was digitized in BHL by Harvard University, Ernst Mayr Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology.

References

Steins, John. Woodblock Printing. http://www.johnsteins.com/woodblock-printing.html.
Stiassny, Melanie. Natural Histories: Opulent Oceans. New York: Sterling Publishing, 2014. Print.

February 6, 2017by michelle.underhill
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Interconnected Naturalist : Edmund Heller and the Field Notes Project

One of the great aspects of the BHL Field Notes Project is how the field notes we are digitizing – and the naturalists who created them – have connections to multiple project partners. Edmund Heller is one of these interconnected naturalists.

Heller was a naturalist active in the early twentieth century who participated in several expeditions sponsored by different institutions across the nation, including a number of BHL Field Notes Project partners. He traveled with Theodore Roosevelt for the Smithsonian African Expedition, traveled to Asia with Roy Chapman Andrews of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), served as a collector for the Field Museum, joined Hiram Bingham on Yale University and National Geographic Society’s Expedition in the Andes of Peru, and collected in Alaska with noted collector Annie Alexander, who proposed and helped establish the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Since Heller moved around from institution to institution, participating in what he referred to as an “unequaled record of expeditions,” he is a classic example of a naturalist with field notebooks all over the map. Through the Field Notes Project, we have the opportunity to bring together parts of his collection. Nine of Heller’s notebooks are currently available in the BHL, contributed by Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). More of his notebooks will be digitized by SIA and AMNH by project end.

In the meantime, why not explore Heller’s work in the BHL?
The BHL Field Notes Project is funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR).

Further Reading:

Where are Heller’s Field Books? – Field Book Project Blog

Expedition Connection: National Geographic Society Yale University Peruvian Expedition, 1915 – Biodiversity Heritage Library Blog

February 2, 2017by lmyrick
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Orchidelirium: The Orchid Craze Takes Printed Form

Walk into most any nursery or florist and you will see beautiful orchids of many colors and sizes, with “easy care” instructions attached right to the pot enabling even the brownest thumb success. Want to shake the winter doldrums? Attend an orchid show or meeting – there are over 500 local groups affiliated with the American Orchid Society alone. Orchids are as diverse as they are beautiful, with over 27,000 accepted species living in nearly every corner of the globe.

We are not alone in our fascination with orchids. In the nineteenth century, Europe was gripped by what has been named “Orchidelirium.”  The collection of orchids from around the world was booming as the industrial revolution continued to change the economy and reach of Europe. Amateur and professional botanists were frantically developing methods to cultivate these exotic plants under glass.

Capitalizing on the orchid trend, a Belgian botanist named Émile de Puydt published a treatise on orchids in French in 1880, entitled Les orchidées, histoire iconographique, organographie, classification, géographie, collections, commerce, emploi, culture, avec une revue descriptive des espèces cultivées en Europe [Orchids, iconographic history, organography, classification, geography, collections, trade, employment, culture, with a descriptive review of the species cultivated in Europe (tr.)].

Les orchidées was published on the tails of another French orchid book directed towards amateurs, entitled L’Orchidophile: traité théorique et pratique sur la culture des Orchidées [The Orchid, theoretical and practical treatise on growing orchids (tr.)] by François du Buysson. Both works contained detailed information regarding orchid culture. However, L’Orchidophile is a hefty book of over 500 pages, with dense text, equipment line drawings, and tables but not a single drawing of these magnificent plants. It appealed to the serious orchid cultivator, but lacked a “wow” factor to make it appeal to a more general French-speaking audience.

De Puydt’s book changed that. The more scholarly sections of Les orchidées are less than half the length of those in L’Orchidophile, yet they are filled with 237 black and white drawings of orchids, exotic locales, and greenhouses bursting with plants. The final section of Les orchidées contains fifty full-page chromolithographs (by M. Leroy and M. Guibert, of whom little is known) of cultured orchids accompanied by elegant descriptions of each species. De Puydt put his writing talents to great use, describing the orchid species as “beautiful (belle),” “magnificent (magnifique),” “pretty (jolie),” and “very splendid (plus slendide).” The book received awards from the Société d’Acclimatation de Paris and the Société centrale d’Horticulture de Paris.

Following de Puydt’s book, another Belgian botanist specializing in orchids, Jean Jules Linden, began publication of Lindenia: iconograhie des orchidées in 1885. With lavish illustrations and short 1-2 page hints to growers, the work was quickly translated into English and published to reach an even more general audience of orchid-lovers. Linden highlighted orchids available through his business L’Horticulture Internationale as well as commonly cultivated species and new discoveries.

A modern review of Les orchidées, published in 1973, notes that the descriptions of the orchids in this work lack sufficient scientific and cultural details to be a good resource for modern growers. The review author also criticized the limitations of the drawings and considers the value of the book to be primarily for book collectors. While Les orchidées may not be as detailed as L’Orchidophile or as colorful as Lindenia, it is a well written and beautiful historical overview during the time of “Orchidelirium.”

Paul Émile de Puydt (1810-1891) was born and died in Mons, a small city in western Belgium where his father served for four years as governor of Hainaut province. De Puydt founded the horticulture society of Mons and published many articles in scientific journals and newspapers on horticulture.

De Puydt did not confine his interests to botany. He was a writer, novelist, playwright, and political theorist. He coined the term “panarchy” or competitive government, where people choose the government in which they want to be a citizen. Different forms of government compete for citizens in an open market and more than one form of government can exist in the same locale. In modern times, the term panarchy also refers to a conceptual framework to understand stability and change of complex systems.

Resources

Bibliography

January 26, 2017by ulib-libraryjobs
Blog Reel, Featured Books

The New York Zoological Society

This is part of a series of monthly posts related to the IMLS-funded Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) grant. The project, which solicits new content through 2017, is aimed at enhancing BHL’s collection by digitizing valuable and unique material from natural-history related organizations in the U.S. that are outside the BHL consortium. Learn more, and find past blogs, at the EABL wiki.

The New York Zoological Society (NYZS) was chartered in 1895. Its founders were Andrew H. Green, planner of some of New York City’s most important cultural institutions; Henry Fairfield Osborn, professor and curator at the American Museum of Natural History; and Madison Grant, a lawyer and conservationist. The latter two were members of the Boone and Crockett Club, a group of hunters and conservationists founded by fellow New York naturalist Theodore Roosevelt. From the start, this influential coalition dedicated itself to the three “objects of the society,” outlined in the first Annual Report of 1897:

  1. The establishment of a free zoological park containing collections of North American and exotic animals, for the benefit and enjoyment of the general public, the zoologist, the sportsman and every lover of nature.
  2. The systematic encouragement of interest in animal life, or zoology, amongst all classes of the people, and the promotion of zoological science in general.
  3. Co-operation with other organizations in the preservation of the native animals of North America, and encouragement of the growing sentiment against their wanton destruction.

The first goal was realized in 1899 with the opening of the Bronx Zoo, originally called the New York Zoological Park. William Hornaday, the founder of the National Zoo, selected the site, chose curators and staff, and became its first director.

In 1902, New York City gave the NYZS control of the New York Aquarium, located at the time in Battery Park, Manhattan (and since 1957 in Coney Island, Brooklyn). By 1993, when the NYZS changed its name to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the city had handed over the reins of three other wildlife parks: the Central Park Zoo, the Queens Zoo, and the Prospect Park Zoo.

Just as it had wasted no time in opening a “free zoological park,” the NYZS set about accomplishing its second and third goals in short order. On the conservation front, Hornaday was particularly concerned about the state of America’s large mammals, decimated by unchecked hunting. He acquired seven American buffalo (bison) for the Bronx Zoo in 1899; these were used several years later to help reestablish western U.S. populations teetering on the brink of extinction.

Also in 1899, Hornaday hired William C. Beebe as curator of ornithology. Beebe traveled the world doing field research for the Zoo, but his interest was not confined to birds; in 1922 he founded a Department of Tropical Research, and in 1934—on behalf of that department—he descended in a bathysphere to observe the deep sea in the waters off Bermuda. Later on, he turned his attention to insects and reptiles. Much of his research is presented in Zoologica, the scientific journal that NYZS published from 1907 to 1973.

In 1940, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr, son of the NYZS founding member of the same name, was appointed director. Over the next 22 years, he worked to expand the conservation work of the NYZS, establishing programs in Africa and Southeast Asia. William Conway, who took over as director of the zoo in 1962 and president of the NYZS in 1992, used the zoo to breed endangered species. Today, as the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization is at work in hundreds of conservation programs around the world and continues to attract visitors to its wildlife parks in New York City.

BHL and the EABL team are grateful to the WCS for granting permission to digitize the complete run of Zoologica, a journal of tremendous scientific importance. Zoologica has been digitized by Smithsonian Libraries and the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. It is now indexed by article and, together with the other NYZS publications in BHL, chronicles the history and research of one of the world’s most important conservation organizations.

Reference

“History.” WCS Library & Archives. Accessed January 18, 2017.         http://ielc.libguides.com/wcs/archives_history

January 19, 2017by [email protected]
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Michał Piotr Boym’s Flora sinensis, fructus floresque humillime [Flora of China, fruits and flowers].

Flora sinensis is one of the first natural history books on China by a European. Authored by Michał Piotr Boym, it was published in 1656 by Matthæi Rictii in Vienna. Boym dedicated it to Leopold I (1640-1705), Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary and Croatia, King of Bohemia and King of Serbia, and included a poem incorporating chronograms alluding to his coronation date, 1655.

Augustin Pyramus, a Swiss Botanist, identified Boym as the first person to use ‘flora’ to define the plants of a particular region, habitat or geological period. Despite the title, it contains some animals, as well as a selection of choice plants, some of which are non-Chinese natives introduced from the Americas in the previous century, including guava (Psidium), papaya (Carica) and pineapple (Ananas) (fig. 2). Others, including cinnamon (Cinnamomum) (fig. 9), ginger (Zingiber) (fig. 3) and pepper (Piper), were important commodities of the spice trade.

Flora sinensis contains 48 pages of text and 23 black and white woodcut illustrations, 17 of plants, five of animals and one of a Nestorian Stele. Boym describes each species, its physical characteristics, common names, geographical distribution and medicinal virtues. The plates have titles in Chinese, transliterated into Latin, and in the Kew Gardens copy most of the Latin plant names have also been added to genus level.

Whilst the book was originally published uncoloured, some rare hand-coloured copies exist, notably at the Natural History Museum in London, Université de Namur, and SLUB Dresden.

In 1664, Melchisédech Thévenot published a 15 page French translation, Flora Sinensis, ou traité des fleurs, des fruits, des plantes et des animaux particuliers à la Chine In: Relations de divers voyages curieux : qui n’ont point esté publiées, est qu’on a traduit or tiré des originaux des voyageurs françois, espagnols, allemands, portugais, anglois, hollandois, persans, arabes & autres orientaux, the 1696 edition of which is available on BHL.

Unfortunately the illustrations in this edition appear to be composites derived from the originals and some, notably the Chinese leopard (fig. 5), are not included. Flora sinensis was also the source for much of the natural history content of Athanasius Kircher’s China illustrata (1667).

Michał Piotr Boym was born the son of a wealthy merchant in Lwów, Poland in 1612. He joined the Jesuits in 1629 and was ordained in 1641. He sailed from Lisbon in 1643, reaching Macao, via Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, Mozambique, the Bay of Bengal, Siam, and Goa, in 1647.

It was probably in Mozambique that he observed the hippopotamus, illustrated in Flora Sinensis (fig. 8), and wrote an account of the natural history of Mozambique, one of the oldest works on Africa in Polish (Cafraria: a P.M. Boym Polono Missa Mozambique 1644 Januario 11).

Boym taught and studied Chinese in Macao and started to write on medicine, natural history and Chinese society after he moved to Hainan. It was there that he founded a mission, but had to flee to Tonkin when the Manchus invaded the island. He was then sent on a diplomatic mission to the court of the last Ming dynasty ruler, the Emperor Yongli, in Guangxi.

In 1650, Boym left Zhaoqing carrying letters from the court to Pope Innocent X, requesting support against the Manchus. He arrived in Venice in 1652, where he began work on various publications, including Flora sinensis and Fondo Borgia Cinese 531. (The latter unpublished collection of 18 maps is still in the Vatican Library, and includes the first European map to include Korea as a peninsula, not an island. It also features Chinese topography and Chinese and transliterated place names). He finally reached Rome in 1653, but it was not until 1655 that he was granted an audience with Pope Alexander VII.

In 1656, Boym set out again from Lisbon to China, but only four of the eight priests accompanying him survived as far as Goa and the news from the Chinese court was ominous. He persevered, arriving in Siam in 1658, but died on 22 June 1659 somewhere in the province of Guangxi before reaching the emperor’s court. He has no known grave.

One of the plants described by Boym is a favourite Christmas spice. The rich spicy flavour of cinnamon (fig. 9) is a Christmas ingredient in recipes such as cakes, puddings, mince pies, Zimtsterne (Christmas stars), lebkuchen, mulled wine and glühwein. It was also used in medicine and as an ingredient of oils and perfumes.

Early trade in cinnamon to the Roman and Greek empires was controlled by Arab traders, who kept the source secret. It was thought, by both Herodotus and Theophrastus (4th and 5th century BC) to have come from Arabia, and locating the source was an ambition of 15th and 16th century European explorers.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, Venetian traders controlled the cinnamon trade in Europe until the Portuguese broke their monopoly when they arrived in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in the early 1500s, when cinnamon was one of the most highly prized and valuable spices in Europe. The Dutch expelled the Portuguese from the island in the mid 17th century, monopolising the trade and maintaining cinnamon’s rarity by refusing to allow commercial farming until the 1770s. The East India Company obtained control in 1796, when the Dutch were ousted, and retained it until 1833, when the cinnamon trade was opened to all.

Cinnamon is the prepared bark of Cinnamomum verum (synonym C. zeylanicum Bl., Laurus cinnamomum) in the family Lauraceae. It is indigenous to Sri Lanka and south India and widely cultivated in Sri Lanka (approximately 80% of total output), Indonesia, Java, Seychelles, Madagascar, South West Indies, Brazil, Martinique, and Jamaica.

Other items written by Boym include:

Bibliography:

  • Lehner, M. & Lehner, G. (2016) M.Boym: Flora Sinesis [online]. Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0. [Accessed 12 December 2016].
  • Davidson, A. (2006). The Oxford companion to food. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.186-187.
  • Hart, A. (2015). Michał Piotr Boym: Flora Sinensis In: J. Magee, ed., Rare treasures from the Library of the Natural History Museum. 1st ed. London: NHM, p. 38-45.
  • Jeong, S. (2016). The Silk Road Encyclopedia. Irvine, California: Seoul Selection. [Accessed 12 December 2016].
  • Rema, J. &. (2008). Cinnamon and cassia. In: V. P. Parthasarathy ed., Spice crops, Volume 2, tree spices. New Delhi: Today & Tomorrow’s, p. 29-75.
  • Van Wyk, B. E. (2013). Culinary herbs and spices of the world. Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, p. 104.
December 22, 2016by ulib-libraryjobs
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Featured Books

Holmes, Shells, and the Intersection of Art & Science

From November 28th through December 9th, BHL is joining the Smithsonian Libraries, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Field Book Project, and Smithsonian Transcription Center in hosting the #ManyHatsofHolmes transcription event. This event challenges volunteers around the world to help us transcribe William Henry Holmes’ archival materials. Learn more on the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog.

As the hashtag implies, William Henry Holmes (1846-1933) studied a variety of topics throughout his distinguished career, including anthropology, archaeology, art, and geology. He spent much of his career affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. He studied art under Theodore Kauffman and went on to work as a scientific illustrator with Smithsonian staff. In 1872, he was appointed artist-topographer to the United States survey of the territories under Ferdinand V. Hayden and in 1874 was appointed assistant geologist. He went on to work with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) before returning to the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum (USNM). Holmes eventually became head curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Anthropology and Director of the National Gallery of Art.

Many of Holmes’ field notes and personal records have been digitized by Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Institution Archives as part of The Field Book Project. These are available in BHL. In addition to these archival materials, BHL also holds a number of publications by Holmes.

One of those publications is Art in Shell of the Ancient Americans, which was published in 1883 as part of the second annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology.

Holmes intended this publication to be a preliminary study of the ways in which Native Americans in the distant past used shells as a medium for artistic expression and how this artwork represents a phase in the evolution of human culture. It discusses the use of shells as implements, utensils, and objects of ornamentation (such as jewelry).

Most of the objects presented in the publication were obtained from graves and tumuli (ancient burial mounds), which explains how such delicate pieces survived throughout the centuries. But, while these pieces can be deemed ancient, Holmes did not have enough data to provide a reliable estimation of age.

At this point, you might be wondering why a book about shell art would be relevant for a biodiversity library and what bearing it might have on scientific research. The simple answer is that these shells are remnants of living creatures – mollusks that died long ago but still left behind a legacy in shell. However, Art in Shell has relevance for scientific research beyond this vague connection with the natural world.

In the publication, Holmes attempts to identify the species (or most-specific taxa possible) to which the shell used for the object belongs. This information provides a valuable record of human interaction with various mollusk species and helps document the diversity of species present in ancient America. The presence of shells in various regions, when coupled with species distribution data that demonstrates the transport of these shells from their source, can also provide insight into historic Native American migration paths, tribal contacts, and trade.

Thus, this book is not just a book about art. It represents a beautiful union of art and science. And considering the many disciplinary hats that Holmes wore throughout his career, it’s no surprise that his publication would bridge these two worlds. Art in Shell is therefore not only a very fitting book to highlight as a representation of the union of Holmes’ many interests, but the insights it provides into Native American culture also make it particularly relevant this month as we celebrate Native American Heritage Month.

So, can we tie this publication back to the Random Records of a Lifetime series that is the subject of our #ManyHatsofHolmes transcription event? Holmes’ discussion about his work with shell art in these records seems to be fairly limited, but in his biographical sketch in volume I, Holmes does report that, “The years 1882-3-4 and 5 were devoted largely to Museum work and the study of primitive art in its various branches.” As Art in Shell was published in 1883, this account is likely a reference in part to his work on this publication (as well as the many others on ancient American art that he produced during this time period).

As you participate in the challenge, can you find additional references in the Random Records that can be linked back to Art in Shell? If you do, share them on social media with #ManyHatsofHolmes.

Additionally, if you need a break from transcription or want another challenge, try taxon tagging the illustrations from Holmes’ Art in Shell on Flickr. By tagging the shell art with the taxonomic name of the species to which the shell belongs, you can help researchers more easily discover which species ancient Americans were using to create these objects. Learn more about taxon tagging in this article and see our detailed instructions here. Find the Art in Shell images in Flickr here.

See this video for basic instructions on how to tag the illustrations in Art in Shell:

Holmes was truly a man of many trades and talents. As you dig deeper into his work during the #ManyHatsofHolmes event, be sure to share your findings on social media with the hashtag. Thanks so much for participating in our Holmes extravaganza!

November 30, 2016by michelle.underhill
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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