Great Natural History Books and Their Creators (review)

Ray Desmond's book Great Natural History Books and Their Creators has as its subject some of the most beautiful illustrated books ever created, and it is, accordingly, a beautiful book to behold. It is printed on sturdy paper stock, and the illustrations are reproduced at a quality that allows for the detail and texture of the original images to be studied and appreciated. The book is a delight to read and browse, and it does justice to the colorful and ambitious creations that are its focus.

Rather than as a linear survey of the development of natural history books, Desmond structures his material as a series of vignettes, each focusing on an individual work that, in the author's words, "has an interesting or distressing story to tell." These stories, while illustrative of the challenges the creators of such books faced, lack an overarching narrative that ties together the various strands of information the author provides. The books are individually discussed from their inception through their production and then set aside when the next chapter, and story, begins. This shifting focus may be frustrating to readers without a solid grounding in the background of natural history books. Despite this, Desmond achieves his goal of describing the sheer amount of effort and risk that went into the production of natural history books. Each story contains plenty of bookmaking and publishing drama, and the physical scale of the production of some of the larger format works provides an insight into how difficult these books were to create.

One of the strongest sections of the book is the opening chapter, which discusses in detail not how the books were made but how they were sold. Natural history books provide the context for an examination of the financial aspects of producing illustrated (and often hand-colored) books during the handpress period. This section of Desmond's text is valuable both as a general overview of bookselling practices as well as a detailed examination of issues in the sale of natural history books.

While the segmented nature of the text has its drawbacks, on the whole this is a wonderful book full of engaging stories that is beautifully designed and printed by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press.