Birds of America

By John James AudubonAbbeville Press, 2013The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about the increased peril faced by so-called ‘coffee table’ books in the age of the iPad; publishers of oversized art and fashion books were quoted expressing their worries about what their products will be able to offer to a new generation accustomed to finding all its visual content online, instantly, at the swipe of a finger. Not long after that article, Audubon magazine produced an issue arranged around the theme “Why Birds Matter” in which vociferous naturalist Scott Weidensaul contributed a somewhat short-tempered piece that concluded with rather raucous stem-winding:

We have, all of us, been transfigured simply by watching a flying bird. We have been lifted out of ourselves; we have felt our hearts race, felt the hairs on the back of our necks rise when the wings flash by.And we’ve realized that for those moments, we were privileged to experience something beyond ourselves – that older, greater, glorious world that a wild bird inhabits, and which through its very existence embodies and makes vivid to us.

“Birds matter,” Weidensaul asserts, “Period” – an assertion seconded in the most imposing and monumental manner by Abbeville Press in their publication of a new edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, which former New York mayor Philip Hone called “probably the most splendid book ever published.” The Abbeville volume is a reproduction of the “Baby Elephant” edition of the great folio work Audubon brought forth in installments from 1827 to 1838, but as anyone who’s ever seen Audubon’s original can attest, The Birds of America is one of the few books ever made for which words are hopelessly inadequate.

Even though it’s but a fraction of the size of Audubon’s original “Double Elephant” folio (in which his subjects were all painted at life-size, the largest printed book ever then made), the Abbeville Baby Elephant edition is almost embarrassingly opulent; it stands nearly a meter tall, it weighs as much as a fat bulldog, and when it’s made to avalanche out of its slipcase, it lies flat open on any page. Its colors are incredibly crisp, and the details on every page are beguilingly precise, and the paper quality very nearly approximates the heavy, creamy hand-tooled pages of Audubon’s original. At less than $200, it’s an altogether extraordinary production – for the passing of the palm over the pages, for the turning of the great leaves in wonder and contemplation, this is as far from an iPad as a man-made thing can be. Astonishment was an operative part of The Birds of America from the beginning. Jean Jacques Fougere Audubon, a brawny, long-haired native of what is now Haiti who’d come to the fledgling United States as a boy in 1803 and fallen deeply in love with the natural beauties of the New World, conceived his masterpiece gradually, over the course of a decade in which he married Lucy Bakewell, had children, started and failed at various businesses in Kentucky, Mississippi, and New Orleans, haphazardly supported himself by tutoring in French and fencing (or by giving impromptu violin performances on his Cremona), and gradually, eagerly learned the craft of art.Once the vision of a grand, sumptuous picture-book on American birds took hold of him, it became an obsession; it sent him down countless country roads, hunting dogs running ahead, a hundred pounds of prints in a sack on his back, in search of patrons and publishers for a work he could in no way afford to produce on his own. His dream sometimes put him at the mercy of liars and speculators, and he heard many big, false promises. “Audubon’s perspicacity in regard to the genus Homo sapiens in no way equaled his growing knowledge of wildlife,” writes Alice Ford, his first and best modern biographer. “His determination to see the good in those around him sometimes allowed him to be as easily snared as one of his feathered friends.” He found little interest in such an elaborate investment until he traveled to England in 1826 (using Lucy’s savings), where he became an instant ‘authentic frontier American’ sensation – and where his bulging portfolio amazed everybody (as one Edinburgh engraver exclaimed, “My God, I never saw anything like this before!”) And Audubon was amazed in turn: the more examples he saw of the wildfowl artwork of his immediate predecessors, the more certain he became that he had something importantly new to offer the world. After viewing the work of one such potential rival, he wrote in his journal that he imagined he could feel the uplifting wing-beats of fame about his head and hear the cry, “Call out, call out, call out – and loud, loud, loud, ‘AUDUBON!!!!’” As we’re told in the Introduction to this new Abbeville edition:

The former bankrupt businessman became a supersalesman, traveling from city to city to secure subscriptions. Meanwhile, as a sort of production manager, he monitored with infinite care the work of engravers and a corps of colorists. He was not only the artist, author, and scientist but also publisher, business manager, and bill collector.

No non-suicidal modern publisher would attempt to duplicate the dimensions of the “Elephant” folio that resulted from all those original efforts, and Audubon knew something of this even while he was producing it. Smaller, more affordable editions of The Birds of America followed quickly after the very limited run of the first, and they gripped the world’s imagination as few books of art had done before. Audubon’s birds became the vibrant, full-color Platonic ideals of their living originals even before their artist died in 1851 at the age of 67, as his protégé George Sutton frankly noted:

He made many errors, but he also left a living record that has been of inestimable value and stimulus to students, and made an everlasting mark in American ornithology. It is indeed hard to imagine what the science would be like in this country – and what the state of our bird world – had he not lived and wrought, and become a demigod to the ardent youth of the land.

The new Abbeville edition of the “Baby Elephant” folio attends to more of those errors Sutton mentioned than any previous Audubon edition. Most of these corrections were done by Virginia Marie Peterson and the great bird naturalist and artist Roger Tory Peterson (Abbeville calmly refers to the author of 1934’s seminal A Field Guide to the Birds as “perhaps the Audubon of our age,” and they’ll get no argument from anybody I’ve ever met), and they take many forms. Audubon’s illustrations have been re-ordered into groups that follow current phylogenetic classifications (so seabirds are grouped with seabirds, finches with finches, raptors with raptors, and so on – as opposed to the unruly mob J.J. A. originally presented to his readers). The scientific and common names for all the entries have been updated (but Audubon’s originals are retained in brackets, for the interested completist). The artist’s basic errors (mis-identifying as new species birds that were simply in off-season plumage, for instance) are corrected, and the thumbnail illustrations for all the plate-commentaries are now in full color. The Petersons conduct an ongoing – and utterly fascinating – dialogue with Audubon’s own Ornithological Biography all throughout this version, commenting, for instance, on his vivid picture of a snowy egret (Egretta thula), “We wonder whether the small figure in the ditch at the right was meant to be Audubon himself, carefully stalking the bird that is to be immortalized as his model.” You may not have noticed that tiny figure in the ditch at the right before, but with the Petersons as your guides, you’ll be watching for such details from now on.When picture reproductions are this big and this exactingly beautiful, details leap out everywhere. In the picture of the Northern mockingbird (Passeriformes mimidae), we can feel the drama as the birds flurry to protect the eggs from a marauding rattlesnake; we stare at the red carnage of the kill under the talons of two peregrine falcons; we see how an osprey flies with its captured fish pointed snout-forward to cut down on wind resistance; we smile at the riot of color in the picture of one of Audubon’s favorites, the pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus); we feel the early morning energy of the clapper rail (Gruiformes rallidae) as it races along wet sand. Even the smallest artistic decisions (often made between Audubon and the various artists who provided backgrounds for some of his engravings) take on added life in pages of this size, like the way the dark background accentuates the bright, simple plumage of the American White Pelican (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), about which the artist himself wrote:

I feel great pleasure, good reader, in assuring you that our White Pelican, which has hitherto been considered the same as that found in Europe, is quite different. In consequence of this discovery, I have honored it with the name of my beloved country, ever the mighty streams of which, may this splendid bird wander free and unmolested.

“Unmolested” indeed. The dark miracle behind the abundant animation on display in so many of Audubon’s paintings is how thoroughly dead the birds were who star in them. If there’s a certain queasiness involved in modern ornithology’s embrace of its founding father (to say nothing of the pretty much perpetual patter of apology the Audubon Society must make for its namesake), it derives from the fact that for virtually the whole of his life (until old age dimmed his sight), Audubon scarcely ever clapped eyes on a living bird without then doing his best to turn it into a dead bird. He was a slow and careful draughtsman, so sketching from life was out of the question. Instead, he trapped birds, shot birds, gassed birds, and snared birds in vast, countless numbers (when he was a young man, he claimed a day just didn’t feel right unless he’d killed at least a hundred birds – in other words, far, far more than his art required). He developed a revolutionary system of mounting these victims on wire frames to simulate the poses of life, and in this way he was able to make his illustrations much more interesting than the pictures of his major predecessor, Alexander Wilson, whose birds looked stately and very, very dead.

  Bluebird and Blossoms, by Robert Bateman One of the most interesting features of the Petersons’ Introduction is the generous credit they pay to the dozens of first-rate (and considerably less murderous) bird-artists who’ve followed in Audubon’s wake. There are lovely examples from the artwork of such titans as Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Allan Brooks, Guy Coneleach, Robert Bateman, Iowa’s Maynard Reece, and Roger Tory Peterson himself (apparently not worthy of mention in this roster is the art of James Gordon Irving, whose cozy illustrations for The Golden Nature Guide to Birds probably were probably seen by more people than all the others combined).    In most objective ways, all those later illustrations are huge improvements on Audubon’s. They’re more accurate, more three-dimensional, more colorful, and most of their subjects came out of the experience alive and well. And yet there’s not one of those later artists who wouldn’t agree with Sutton about the bloodthirsty demigod who created their profession: without the seismic epic that was The Birds of America, modern ornithology would have needed to skulk around for some far less evocative way to be born.The good folks at Abbeville Press obviously agree. They’ve lovingly created a slip-cased edition of The Birds of America that would be just what the Audubon himself always intended: an “ornament and permanent source of wonder” in any nature-loving home. The book itself may weigh as much as an engine block, but the birds soar. ____ Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Washington Post, The National, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is the Managing Editor of Open Letters Monthly, and hosts one of its blogs, Stevereads.