Flex Mentallo

Once printed, the plates were coloured in by hand, a laborious and skilled process. Three of Sharpe’s ten daughters were colourists who had worked on other ornithological books, and it is possible that they contributed to their father’s masterpiece. Certainly the hand-colouring is of a quality and sophistication that mark the culmination of a great tradition, evincing skills that modern practitioners find impossible to match.

Initially employed as a taxidermist [he was known as the 'bird-stuffer'] by the Zoological Society, Gould's fascination with birds from the east began in the "late 1820s [when] a collection of birds from the Himalayan mountains arrived at the Society's museum and Gould conceived the idea of publishing a volume of imperial folio sized hand-coloured lithographs of the eighty species, with figures of a hundred birds. Gould's friend and mentor N. A. Vigors supplied the text. Elizabeth Gould made the drawings and transferred them to the large lithographic stones. Having failed to find a publisher, Gould undertook to publish the work himself; it appeared in twenty monthly parts, four plates to a part, and was completed ahead of schedule. He never claimed he was the artist for these plates, but repeatedly wrote of the 'rough sketches' he made from which, with reference to the specimens, his artists painted the finished drawings. Following Gould’s death in 1881, Sharpe set out to create an entirely new work dedicated entirely to birds of paradise and to bower-birds, then thought to be related to birds of paradise. Sharpe chose John Gerrard Keulemans and William Matthew Hart as the artists for the project. Both were specialists in the subject; many of Keulemans’s works can still be found on display in the American Museum of Natural History.

Sharpe was Assistant Keeper of the British Museum’s Zoology Department, and had collaborated with John Gould on The Birds of New Guinea. Papua New Guinea is remote by anyone’s standards. It’s the world’s largest tropical island, its forest-clad mountains and ravines home to bird and animal species found nowhere else on the planet.

His Monograph of the Paradiseidae, or Birds of Paradise, and Ptilonorhynchidae, or Bower-Birds was first published by Henry Sotheran & Co. of London, in two volumes, between 1891 and 1898.

Richard Bowdler Sharpe (22 November 1847 – 25 December 1909) was an English zoologist and ornithologist who worked as curator of the bird collection at the British Museum of Natural History. In the course of his career he published several monographs on bird groups and produced a multi-volume catalogue of the specimens in the collection of the museum. He described several new species of bird and a several species of bird including Sharpe's longclaw (Hemimacronyx sharpei) and Sharpe's pied-babbler (Turdoides sharpei) are named in his honour.

Sharpe's Birds of Paradise Which brings me to the book in my possession I wanted to share with you. Dedicated entirely to birds of paradise and bower-birds, it is one of the greatest bird books and, for many, the most beautiful ever created. Needless to say it is not an original, which would set me back a cool $90,000. This is the Folio Society Facsimile Edition, published at the actual size of 21.5"x15", and it's pretty awesome. (Here I'm combining some photos of my copy along with others culled from the internet, as I'm not really equipped to take good photos.)

However, Lear’s work is beaten, price-wise, by a similar work from the other side of the English Channel. Pre-dating Lear by about 30 years, Francois Levaillant’s work Histoire naturelle des perroquets (1801-1805), or Natural History of Parrots, sold for $225,463 back in 2007.

The Parrot Chronicles One of the people who illustrated for Gould was Edward Lear. Despite receiving no credit for his work in Gould’s books, Lear is renowned on his own merits. His 1832 masterpiece Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, which he painted as a teenager, typically sells at auction—even in so-so condition—for well over $100,000. Fewer than a hundred copies are known to exist.

John Gould’s (Limited) Works John Gould is sometimes known as “Britain’s Audubon,” but unlike his American counterpart Gould is infamous for not having actually written or illustrated a number of works that bore his name, instead leaving the latter task to more talented artists (including his wife, Elizabeth). Even so, a single folio credited to Gould can easily go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and an “exceptional and pristine” 12-folio set of first editions of his bird books, published between 1831 and 1888, is currently for sale for $2,175,000 at Shapero Books in London.

It is estimated that, when adjusted for inflation, five of the 10 most expensive books ever sold were copies of Birds of America. Only about a dozen are owned privately; the rest are in the hands of institutions, many of which display their copies for the public benefit, like the one at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Birds of America is also very likely the world’s most expensive wall covering. In 1827, Lady Isabella Hertford cut up her copy of the mammoth 39.5” by 28.5” handmade book and used it to wallpaper her drawing room.

The Birds of America Often cited as “the most expensive book of all time,” there are still 120 known intact copies of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America (which was published between 1827 and 1838). While there are a handful of books in the world that may be worth more, until 2013 Birds of America held the record for the most money paid at auction for any single printed work: £7,321,250, or about $11.5 million.

Spending nearly $200K on a book about birds (or anything, really) may strike some people as excessive, but as it turns out rare ornithological texts are consistently some of the most expensive books around.

The book, which was written by Saverio Manetti and illustrated by Violante Vanni and Lorenzo Lorenzi, sold for $191,000, setting a world record for the priciest online book sale.

The Natural History of Birds The 19th century saw a rapid evolution in the publication of natural history books. Magnificent large-scale tomes, sumptuously bound and illustrated with hand-coloured plates, celebrated all the latest discoveries of exotic birds and animals around the world. Today, the surviving copies of these books command quite extraordinary prices. When the online book marketplace AbeBooks released a list of the most expensive books it sold in 2015, topping the list was an 18th century Italian tome with a long-winded title: Storia naturale degli uccelli trattata con metodo e adornata di figure intagliate in rame e miniate al naturale. Ornithologia methodice digesta atque iconibus aeneis ad vivum illuminatis. Or, as it's known in English: A Natural History of Birds.

Though I read avidly, there is more to living with books than simply reading them, as all collectors know. Possession is nine tenths of the collector's handbook after all. But in books there is also that great comfort in being surrounded by art, knowledge and speculation, as well as fiction of all kinds. The desire to buy more books than you can physically read in one human lifetime is actually so universal, there’s a specific word for it: tsundoku. Defined as the stockpiling of books that will never be consumed, the term is a Japanese portmanteau of sorts, combining the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku” (meaning “to leave for a while”) and “doku” (meaning “to read”). It originated as a play on words in the late 19th century, during what is considered the Meiji Era in Japan. At first, the “oku” in “tsunde oku” morphed into “doku,” meaning “to read,” but since “tsunde doku” is a bit of a mouthful, the phrase eventually condensed into “tsundoku.” And a word for reading addicts was born. So this is your final warning - stop reading now, or risk becoming 'tsundokued' like me!

I hope this will be entertaining, and serve as a digestif after - let's face it - far too much Christmas cheer. I dont know in advance what I'll post, just making it up as I go along day by day, and as time allows. Having drastically scaled back my comic collecting in recent years, I've focused more on my love of books, and find that I appreciate them more. I've collected books all my life, books on every topic under the sky, and indeed my apartment is as much a library as a living space, shaped more by bookcases than furniture.

Over the festive season I like to use Serendip to entertain fellow boardies with topics sometimes linked to but always at an oblique angle to comics and collecting. This year I thought it might be fun to loot my library for extraordinary books, whether because of their content, or in the case of limited editions and facsimiles, are extraordinary in their creation. As with all things related to Serendipity, the true art is to see and make use of connections between seemingly disconnected topics, so I intend to focus each narrative on a given book and use it as a pathway to other subjects, weaving some of my other interests into the narrative as I go. This is fun for me because it stimulates me to follow the white rabbit down new rabbit holes.

Tsundoko 'What's the point of having a library if you've read all the books?' Mark Twain

Loving this thread

Cera would've been invaluable during the Cuban missile crisis - 'We're eyeball to eyeball here, and the other guy just purred.'

This photo gives me an overpowering urge to a a achoo!

I'm especially impressed by the Crimson Comets. Years ago an Australian dealer listed a load of stuff on Ebay - and I recall they said that this is one of the hardest titles to acquire. Any chance of a splash page?

It's Christmas after all.