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.