Gessner’s Octopus

Have you ever wanted to browse the stacks of a rare book library? To explore the pages of Gessner’s sixteenth century masterpiece Historiae Animalium and ask an expert why a walrus is illustrated with wing-like appendages? Or study Alexander Wilson’s passenger pigeon illustration and learn from a rare book authority the scientific implications of the depictions of now-extinct species?

Of course, you can examine the digital surrogates of many incredible rare books on BHL, but where can you go to get expert knowledge of the importance of these titles, or even understand what these authors of long-ago wrote in the first place if you can’t read Latin?

The American Museum of Natural History can help you get answers to some of your burning rare book questions. A new book, Natural Histories: Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History, provides insight into a selection of spectacularly illustrated volumes from the AMNH’s rare book library. The work, edited by Tom Baione, the Harold Boeschenstein Director of Library Services at AMNH and BHL Institutional Council member, features 40 essays from museum curators, scientists, librarians, and other experts discussing each rare book’s unique qualities and scientific contributions. Furthermore, Natural Histories includes 40 “suitable-for-framing” prints selected from the illustrations found within the rare tomes discussed.

Cover of Natural Histories. Image: “Great Horned Owl” from Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology.

The books highlighted in Natural Histories span from the 16^th century to the early 20^thcentury and include such critical works as Gessner’s Historiae Animalium, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology, Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur, and John James Audubon’s The viviparous quadrupeds of North America. According to Baione,

Natural Histories came about because we wanted to let people know about our rich rare book collection, which contains more than 14,000 volumes and is used by researchers from around the world and includes many unique and hard-to-find volumes.

Microscopic view of snow and frozen water. Micrographia.

Natural Historiesfocuses in particular on the importance of the scientific illustrations found within each rare book discussed. As Baione articulates,

In the days before photography and printing, original art was the only way to capture the likeness of organisms, people, and places, and therefore was the only way to share this information with others. Printed reproductions of natural history art enabled many who’d never seen an elephant, for instance, to try to begin to understand what an elephant looked like and how its unusual features might function…I hope this collection of essays and plates will give readers a better understanding of the science behind these works and an appreciation of the art illuminating their pages.

By this point, if you’ve been following our “Books of the Week” regularly, you know that 18th, 19th, and 20th century taxonomic works weren’t just about the nomenclature they presented, but also the stunning illustrations accompanying these species descriptions. Those books with the most colorful, the most visually dynamic, images are those that we tend to gravitate towards for our posts. So, when we came across a book that has been described as “bridging the gap between science and art,” we simply had to feature it. That book, perhaps one of the most visually-compelling that we’ve yet featured, is Kunstformen der Natur (1904), by Ernst Haeckel.

Over the course of his career, Haeckel, a German biologist, described and named thousands of new species, popularized the work of Charles Darwin in Germany, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and produced dozens of glorious illustrations. In his lifetime alone, over 1000 prints were made of Haeckel’s sketches, 100 of which are found within Kunstformen der Natur. These 100 prints were translated from sketch to lithograph by artist Adolf Giltsch.

Cnidaria, which include sea anemones, jellyfish, and coral, as well as Radiolarians, which are protozoan zooplankton, are some of the most abundant species illustrated within this work. The book was originally published as ten sets from 1899-1904, and was then re-published as a complete work in 1904. Haeckel scholar Olaf Breidbach eloquently wrote that this title is “not just a book of illustrations but also the summation of [Haeckel’s] view of the world.”

What was to us perhaps the most impressive aspect of the images in Kunstformen der Natur was not simply the radiant colors and depth of realism within the creatures depicted, but the way in which each plate was composed, symmetrically balancing each inch of space and arranging each organism artistically beside or around the others so as to not only catch the viewer’s eye, but dynamically draw him in and keep him constantly engaged. Never before or since has plankton been portrayed with such charm and beauty.

While we cannot feature all 100 of the illustrations within this work in this post, we can at least highlight some of our favorites. And, thanks to the BHL Flickr account, which now has over 13,000 images, you can see all of the remaining illustrations displayed for you on one convenient canvas. We hope that you’ll find this title as richly rewarding as we did.