All posts in Featured Books

This week is Big Cats Week, and to celebrate we’re featuring a book in our collection that has some of the loveliest engravings of these majestic felines that we’ve ever seen. The book, Engravings of Lions, Tigers, Panthers, Leopards, Dogs, etc. (1853), by Thomas Landseer, contains 39 plates. The first twenty – of lions, tigers, panthers, and leopards – are engravings by Thomas Landseer after original works by Stubbs, Rubens, Spilsbury, Rembrant, Reydinger, and Edwin Landseer.

While there are many species of plants that flower at night, and among those are many orchids, scientists researching in New Britain just discovered the only orchid species that flowers exclusively at night.

Happy Thanksgiving! We wanted to celebrate the holiday with an appropriate item from our collection. What did we find? Five Hundred Questions and Answers! On Poultry Raising (1899), by James Wallace Darrow. It features everything you could possibly need to know about raising poultry, with categories structured around feeding and care, diseases, eggs, poultry buildings, incubators, and, as you might expect, an entire chapter devoted to turkeys, ducks and geese!

If you were asked who Henry David Thoreau is, chances are you’d have a least a general idea along the lines of an author who wrote, among other things, works centered around natural history themes. If we ask you who John Burroughs is, however, would you be able to confidently respond? The fact is, John Burroughs is recognized as “the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay.” Given the nickname “The Grand Old Man of Nature,” Burroughs was a “virtual cultural institution” of the American Conservation Movement by the turn of the century.

This week for our book of the week, we feature a title that Charles Darwin himself called “one of the great monuments of science in the 19th century.” The book? Voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale(1835-47), by Alcide Dessalines d’Orbigny. The work chronicles d’Orbigny’s travels to South America for the Paris Museum from 1826-1833. As a result of this voyage, d’Orbigny returned to Paris with more than 10,000 natural history specimens.

It’s almost Halloween, and to celebrate, we wanted to feature a book that properly connoted the Halloween spirit. What did we find? Observations Suggested by the Cattle Plague, About Witchcraft, Credulity, Superstition, Parliamentary Reform, and Other Matters (1866), by H. Strickland Constable. This book is a delightful, tongue-in-cheek discussion of the unconventional cures for ailments and diseases that were popularly accepted during the time period. You might be asking, why is this kind of a book in BHL? The answer: Cattle!

This week, while browsing our Flickr site (which, by the way, has over 15,900 images!), we stumbled across the book Field Book of Giant Fishes (1949), by J.R. Norman and F.C. Fraser, and were intrigued. What exactly was a giant fish by this book’s standards, and what would we find when we delved into the pages of this enigmatic title?