History of British Birds. Volume 1: Containing the History and Description of Land Birds. Volume 2: Containing the History and Description of Water Birds
Newcastle, Printed by Charles Henry Cook for R.E. Bewick, 1832/ 1797 and 1804.
Octavo, two volumes, xl, 386 and xxii, 424 pages with hundreds of woodcut illustrations by Thomas Bewick.
Early full polished calf, spines elaborately gilt-tooled in compartments, with a contrasting leather title-label; leather lightly scuffed, marked and bumped at the corners, with minor wear to a couple of corner-tips; endpapers offset; endpapers and adjacent leaves a little foxed, with minimal light foxing elsewhere; front flyleaf of the second volume creased; one leaf in the first volume a little creased and marked, with a long sealed tear (and three other consecutive leaves have an insignificant blemish to the top margin); trifling signs of use and age; a very attractive set with a contemporary gift inscription in ink on the first flyleaf ('Julia Elizabeth Buller | 19th January 1839 | The Gift of her dear Papa').
The set is valued more these days for its numerous vignettes by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) than for its ornithology. 'Apart from the excellence of the principal figures, the numerous tailpiece vignettes that enlivened every spare space in the book came in for special notice. Of these tailpieces Bewick was later to remark: "When I first undertook my labours in Natural History, my strongest motive was to lead the minds of youth to the study of that delightful pursuit; ... I illustrated them with all the fidelity and animation I was able to impart to mere woodcuts without colour; and as instruction is of little avail without constant cheerfulness and occasional amusement, I interspersed the more serious studies with Tale-pieces of gaiety and humour, yet even in these seldom without an endeavour to illustrate some truth, or point some moral." ... Apart from lovingly observed landscape settings, the narrative content of many of Bewick's tailpieces is often ironic and displays a mordant view of the world and human folly: in a decaying churchyard a crumbling inscription, "to the perpetual memory", is washed by the eroding sea; boys who cannot read lead a blind fiddler past a sign warning of man-traps; and a man evading a toll bridge drives his cow through deep water in the river below - losing his hat at a cost far greater than the toll. The gritty reality of the lives of the crippled old soldiers, road menders, blind beggars, and rain-soaked packmen who inhabit Bewick's landscapes is at odds with the sentimental view of those who now reproduce his work on pots and tea towels' ('Oxford Dictionary of National Biography').
Item #123873
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