The biggest book I’ve ever seen! A breathtaking 26 by 39 inches! John James Audubon’s Birds of America is one of history’s most audacious acts of publishing. Produced in the 1830s with 435 color engravings in four volumes, only 119 copies are known to exist. In 2014, Forbes named it one of the top ten most expensive books ever sold at $12.6 million. Incredibly, there’s a copy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, less than twenty miles from home. In the hushed reading room of the Watkinson Library, where a page is turned each week to display yet another avian marvel, my wife Mary and I gazed in raptured awe at a pair of dusky zenaida doves so vivid that I thought I heard them cooing.
After a long, unrelenting Connecticut winter that included a record coldest month, repeated snowstorms, knifing winds, and a glacial crust that didn’t melt until April, we delighted in the dawn chorus of birds penetrating our last dreams as we awoke each morning. Chirps, whistles, husky screeches and sweet gurgling melodies from robins, bluebirds, cardinals, goldfinches, white-breasted nuthatches, and blue jays along with the drumming of woodpeckers seemed the very essence of spring. As a former board member of Audubon Connecticut, an affiliate of the National Audubon Society, and a long-time participant in the Audubon Christmas bird count, this avian opera on the soft dawn air led to thoughts of the master artist and naturalist. Remembering something I’d heard years ago, we were soon on a pilgrimage to Trinity in celebration not only of this most welcome springtime, but Audubon’s upcoming 230th birthday on April 26.
Enthroned in a custom glass and steel case, the open page of the grand book seemed to glow with a
“We started turning pages in 2011,” Watkinson curator Rick Ring, told us. “At one a week, it’ll take about eight years to finish before we start over again.” Donated by a nineteenth century Trinity graduate, the book is particularly valuable because it belonged to Robert Havell, the brilliant English engraver who produced it in London from Audubon’s original paintings. Printed on fine paper from copper plates, the images were then hand painted by a workforce of colorists sometimes numbering over fifty and at a cost of $115,640, over $2 million in today’s money. Despite some criticism from scientific circles, Audubon organized the plates aesthetically, taking readers on a varied and sometimes astonishing journey filled with wonder.
He painted primarily in watercolors, but used oils, ink and egg white to imitate the shine of eyes or a beak, and pastel to affect the downy look of feathers. But what makes the images truly compelling, are the revolutionary life-like poses of the birds achieved by mounting recently killed specimens on wires
Along with his deep and abiding interest in birds, their habits and habitats, Audubon was a skilled hunter who killed large numbers of them to obtain specimens, a necessity in the days before photography, and of little impact on species survival in a time of abundance when hunting for food and sport was wholly unregulated. Regardless, his work stimulated world-wide interest in birds and his name today is an environmental conservation icon around the globe. In more than one way, his art brought the dead back to life.
Pages had been turned on the doves when Mary and I returned to Watkinson a couple days ago for a peek at the bird Ring thought would be displayed on Audubon’s birthday. Unlike the gentle doves, we saw a dramatic rendering of a rough-legged hawk, fierce-eyed and about to rip apart a small, fresh killed bird held between a branch and talons. Clearly, Audubon was not shy about nature’s sometimes grim realities.
As we talked about all the hard traveling, time away from family, and tedious production that must have gone into creating Birds of America, the book before us seemed ever more a marvel. Beyond its
