Oddly, I cannot remember any single book in the library, but the idea of a library containing books filled with birds caught my attention. The idea stays with me yet.

— John G.T. Anderson¹


I have long considered birds my companions. As a child, my father would occasionally find injured fledglings and we’d handrear them at home until they could fly off the balcony; as a young adult, I was drawn to watching them as inspirations toward freedom, weightlessness, and open space. More recently, my research on natural history specimens—especially bird skins and bird taxidermy—lent my ongoing fancy with birds and their role in culture a more material form. Faced with these inert bird objects in museums around the world, less sublime questions became the center of attention: against the background of the world’s current ecological depletion, I study the history of taxonomy and museum displays of nature to understand geopolitical inheritances of coloniality, hierarchization, and dispossession. So, the more I have explored bird specimen collections, the more I have become interested in what we don’t see when we look at them.² This is also how I view bird books, not least because the historical conditions of “sedentary” naturalists studying birds without much access to fieldwork created very peculiar circumstances. The books and folios one can request in rare book libraries are their legacy. Looking at centuries of bird book creation provides a new angle for thinking more deeply about curatorial-editorial modes of publishing, but it also opens a window into the early beginnings of modern ornithology.³ In the absence of living birds at the center of this story, in this essay I explore the co-constitutive relationship and frequent feedback loops between bird specimens, descriptions, and illustrations on the page with regards to the shaping of naturalists’ mental worlds about the life of these creatures—as little puzzles in a bigger mystery. But, reading this history against the grain, I also look critically at the bird book as a tool of capture: while noticing the live birds around us can open our senses to other-than-human ways of knowing, it is important to pay attention to the different value and knowledge systems that inform the representation of avifauna.⁴ In what follows, I unfold these concerns further by revisiting the history of bookmaking through the peculiar lens of ornithology.


These Creatures of the Book

The invention of the modern printing press in 1450 caused the first media revolution. While up until then one archetypal Holy Book had dominated the production and interpretation of medieval scholarship in Europe, the introduction of mechanical movable type opened more diverse possibilities for selecting, reordering, and disseminating written texts—frequently published alongside printed images. Soon spreading beyond the realm of the clergy, book production mushroomed in fifteenth-century Europe, gradually turning publishing into a mass medium with an expanding Renaissance public. With religion thus losing its established monopoly on the written word, new types of knowledge infrastructure superseded scholarly religious institutions, such as scriptoria (where books were copied manually by scribes) and their attendant monastic book collections. But in addition to the modern secular library, the modern natural history museum also developed as an institutional corollary of newly accessible printed matter, capturing the world’s diversity and disseminating it as news and information.⁵ In the realm of natural science, the discipline of biology is particularly indebted to print culture as it aggregated from the interplay and negotiation between (zoological) expeditions, specimen collections, and bookish taxonomical arrays.⁶

When considering the European printed book as an art form, the Nuremberg Chronicle (originally entitled Schedel’sche Weltchronik, 1493) and Peter Apian’s Astronomicum Caesarium (1540) are well-admired early examples that emphasize the relevant interrelationships between image, text, page layout, and the overall role of gathering ideas that is possible in books. [Fig. 01] In both cases, besides the research and production of the content, the process of assembling the books as books (that is, in this case, as bound codices) was also part of the general work of their authors. Apian for instance not only wrote the texts but also produced and prepared the prints of the first editions of his atlas. In this early era of bookmaking, the editorial stages of consolidating material for publication and the various activities of producing printed-matter objects for public circulation were part and parcel—not unlike the case of certain small-scale artistic printing and publishing projects in our times. However, due to our conventional understanding that art and science are “heavens apart,”⁷ just as bourgeois painting and scientific illustration were different professions, the fascinating genealogy of the illuminated natural history book usually remains an overlooked kin when considering the history of publishing as an artistic practice. Yet, it turns out that for anyone interested in the book as a space for paginated exhibitions, natural history books do open up a unique trajectory in parallel to art history.