John Audubon (1785-1851) American, Birds of America, 1990 Baby Elephant Folio Edition. 

Size: 15 1/4 X 12 5/8 X 2 1/2 in. 

This book is titled The National Audubon Society Baby Elephant Folio, Audubon’s Birds of America, edited by Roger Tory Peterson and his wife, Virginia Marie Peterson, and published by Abbeville Press in 1990. The book is half bound, with five raised bands, gilt-ruled compartments with gilt lettering and gilt decorations on the spine, blue cloth with a paste-down of a Great Blue Heron surrounded by triple-gilt borders on the front cover, pale blue endpapers, then the half-title, a full-page color portrait of John Jay Audubon on the frontis (after a portrait of Audubon done by John Syme in 1826), then the title page, the copyright page, a Contents page, a note by the Petersons (like a Preface), a thirty-four page Introduction, a two-page Concordance and seven-page Index of Bird Names at the rear, and the book is not paginated, but there are over 620 pages of text and color plates of the original drawings by Audubon. John Jay Audubon (1785 - 1851) was born in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti ) on his father’s sugarcane plantation, his mother died when he was just a few months old, and his father commanded ships and was imprisoned by the British during the American Revolutionary War. After being released, the father sold part of his plantation because of repeated slave uprisings in the Caribbean and bought a farm a few miles outside Philadelphia. John showed an affinity for birds at an early age, and even though his father wanted John to be a seaman, John suffered from seasickness, so he ended up being a landlubber, and eventually he started to study birds in earnest. He wanted to illustrate birds in a realistic way, so he learned taxidermy from a local physician and created his own nature museum near Philadelphia - one room was brimming with birds' eggs, stuffed raccoons and opossums, fish, snakes, and other creatures - and he burned his earlier drawings to force himself to improve his new works and took detailed notes to document the drawings. After John married, he started a family business in Kentucky, then turned to hunting and fishing to feed his family when business was slow. Transporting goods on the Ohio River, Audubon joined up with Shawnee and Osage hunting parties; he learned their hunting methods, drew specimens by fire light, and had a great respect for Native Americans. In 1812, he became an American citizen, and in the 1820’s, he traveled throughout the southern states to search for more bird specimens, and all this led to his major work, The Birds of America - color plates produced between 1827 and 1839 - and this is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. When he was 41, Audubon took his collection to England - a portfolio of over 300 drawings - and the British could not get enough of Audubon's images of backwoods America. He met with great acceptance as he toured England and Scotland and raised enough money to publish his The Birds of America. The cost of printing the entire work was $115,000 (over $2,000,000 today), paid for from subscriptions, exhibitions, painting commissions, and animal skins, which Audubon hunted and sold. The work had 435 hand-colored engravings of North American birds, and it became known as the Double Elephant folio because Audubon wanted to show the birds life size, so he used paper that was about 26 x 40 inches, the largest sheets available at the time. The Baby Elephant Folio here presents all 435 of John James Audubon's hand-colored engravings as exquisite reproductions from the original plates of the rare Double Elephant folio. Edited by the Petersons, the plates are organized according to modern scientific classification rather than the way Audubon originally organized the plates - he produced them to suit his subscribers - hence, the need for a concordance at the rear. The book measures 15 1/4 x 12 5/8 x 2 1/2 inches deep and is in very good condition. The binding is tight, except for a slight looseness on the inner hinge in front, the text and pages are very clean, and the plates are beautiful - no browning whatsoever - a slight paper loss at the top of the front endpapers, a mild bump at the bottom of the rear cover, and a very attractive copy of this Audubon title. The book is very heavy too, if you plan on having it shipped long distance. A seven-volume set of this work from 1840 goes for $100,000 to $200,000 online, hand-colored etchings with aquatint from 1836 to 1837 go for $7500 to $50,000 apiece, the original price of $185 for the Peterson edition is just above the bar code at the back while first editions from 1981 run from $300 to over $800, and this book is a bargain at an opening price of $60.