All posts in Featured Books

It’s bugs galore today as we feature the book The Cabinet of Oriental Entomology (1848), by J.O. Westwood. This delightful book is full of gorgeous illustrations of exotic insects. We’re picking out some of the illustrations that we particularly love and providing you with an excerpt of what the author had to say about the creatures shown. Enjoy!1) Papilio icarius

“How old is that fossil and how do you know it?” This is the introductory sentence, and the question addressed, in this week’s book of the week, How Old are Fossils (1927), by Sharat Kumar Roy. According to the author, this is a question that is often asked by visitors to a museum, but it is also a question that is particularly time-consuming to answer.

Ever wonder what people believed about natural history in Shakespeare’s time? Well, even if you haven’t, we’re going to tell you. One of our BHL colleagues at Harvard brought the book Natural History in Shakespeare’s Time (1896), by H.W. Seager, to our attention, and we knew we just had to highlight it.

This week, we featured one of our BHL users, Dr. Torsten Dikow, in our regular blog series, BHL and our Users. With a focus on flies in his research, Dr. Dikow identified his favorite book in BHL, which we’re highlighting today as our book of the week.

In our last post, our featured user Mathew Louis named The Ibis as his favorite title in BHL. Thus, we decided to feature this entire series as our “book of the week” this week. Not only is The Ibis full of valuable information on birds, it’s also loaded with beautiful illustrations, many of which are featured in Mathew Louis’ website.

This week we decided to put the power of choosing the book of the week in the hands of our users. So, using the “Questions” app on our Facebook Page, we asked you which book out of the four options given you would like to see featured on our blog. The options were The Snakes of Australia, British Dragonflies, La Galerie des Oiseaux, and A Book of Whales. The winner?

The Snakes of Australia (1869), by Gerard Krefft!