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Featured Books
    All Featured Books
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  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts tagged with book-of-the-week

Blog Reel

Book of the Week: The Memory of a Museum Dissolved but Not Forgotten

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When Musei Leveriani Explicatio, Anblica et Latina (1792-96), by George Shaw, went up for auction at Christie’s Auction House in April of 2008it was described as “one of the most comprehensive natural history collections of the eighteenth century.” It sold for $3,926 USD. The work documents the specimens found in Sir Ashton Lever’s museum (the Museum Leverianum), which was originally housed in his home at Alkrington Hall. The book contains 72 hand-colored engraved plates after, among others, Charles Reuben Ryley, Sarah Stone, and Philip Reinagle. With such a claim as “most comprehensive natural history collection,” we had to check it out, and the quality of the illustrations blew us away. So: Voila! Here you have our book of the week!

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September 15, 2011byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Mollusks, Naples, and Anton Dohrn

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We’re all about mollusks in our book of the week this week, with our featured title being one brimming with some really spectacular watercolors by Comingio Merculiano. What, you might ask, is the title of this exceptional work? I Cefalopodi Viventi nel Golfo di Napoli (Sistematica) (1896). While the copy on BHL consists of only the plates from this title, the entire volume (with text) constitutes the 23rd monograph in the series Fauna and Flora of the Gulf of Naples, published by the Stazione Zoologica. This particular monograph, written by Giuseppe Jatta, presents, as the name suggests, detailed information on the Cephalopods of the Mediterranean.

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September 9, 2011byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Mantell and the Dinosaurs

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We often take it for granted that humans have always known about the existence of the dinosaurs, and that there was never a dispute that they could be anything but the prehistoric giants that we now know them to be. However, this is not the case. As far back as the early 1800s, people had no idea that an entire era of awe-inspiring creatures had lived and died on their planet. Dinosaur fossils that were discovered were attributed to other things, such as the 1676 discovery of most probably a Megalosaurus thigh bone by English museum curator Robert Plot, who believed that thigh bone belonged to a giant man.

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September 2, 2011byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: The Power of the Dog

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It’s no secret that dogs are some of the most popular pets in the world. It is estimated that 60% of all Americans own a dog, and if you’ve ever been a part of a dog-owning household, you probably know why. There are few other types of pets with which you can receive the same level of affection and interaction that you can with a dog, and for many families, their dogs are just as much a member of the family as the parents or children. The web is full of information and images of dogs, and dogs have even played an important role in art through the centuries, as far back as the heyday of the Greeks.

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August 24, 2011byMichelle Strizever
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Illustrations in Zoology

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Ever wanted to get a systematic view of the animal kingdom in picture-book style? Well, this week you’re in luck, because we’re featuring Illustrations of Zoology (1851), with engravings by F.W. Lowry and Thomas Landseer, after the original drawings by Sowerby, Varley, Holmes, Bone, Pyne, Lowry and Charles Landseer. It contains no less than 87 illustrations of animals from all walks of life!

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August 18, 2011byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Fish Aren’t all About Sharks

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Last week we were all about sharks, seeing as it was Shark Week and all. That meant that we were combing through our collections looking for anything that was marked with Shark or even just fish tags. We found a wonderful variety of books and images about sharks (you can peruse them, and lots of other kinds of species, yourself on our Flickr account), but what we also found were a lot of great books about the many other species of fish besides sharks.

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August 11, 2011byGrace Costantino
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Book of the Week: Shark Week, Part 2. The Mythology of the Shark

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Welcome to Part Two of our Shark Week Book of the Week feature! If you recall from our last post, this week we’re featuring the book Shadows in the Sea (1963) by Harold W. McCormick. Last time, we highlighted shark attacks. This time, we’re recounting the various roles sharks have played in legend and mythology throughout the ages. Sharks have been revered as gods and powerful spiritual beings for thousands of years, long before Zeus, or even Cronus, debuted on the scene.

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August 4, 2011byGrace Costantino
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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., 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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