The metaphorical correlation between the library and the
representation of the natural world, however, stuck. Three examples evoke this: When the zoology professor Hinrich
Lichtenstein (1780–1857), a contemporary of Alexander von
Humboldt, was appointed the first director of Berlin’s new
Zoological Museum in 1811, he claimed that a “zoological collection is completely similar to a library.”33 He also lauded the
Parisian Museum national d’histoire naturelle for presenting
the animal kingdom neatly across “all steps and links” rather
than perpetuating the otherwise common “accumulation of
randomly gathered curiosities.”34 A statement about collecting
by Wallace from 1863 echoes these ideas. Arguing why collecting is important in the prospect of habitat loss and extinction, he said: “[The naturalist] looks upon every species of
animal and plant now living as the individual letters which
go to make up one of the volumes of our earth’s history.”35Another instance is the xylotheque, a type of encyclopedic
wood collection in which each wood sample is crafted to
resemble a book in a library. [Fig. 05] Those objects most directly
illustrate that natural history specimens were considered
equivalent to the role and function of books, that is, as usable
and decipherable documents holding clues and stories about
nature—though one must also ask: decipherable and readable
to whom?
*
Anyone who has ever tried to clean up their bookshelves will
know that such an activity soon leads to conundrums of classification, categorization, and hierarchizing—by color, read/unread, genre, theme, etcetera… In the history of science, Carl
Linnaeus (1707–1778) set some lasting standards for ordering
the so-called Book of Nature with publications such as Species
Plantarum (1751) and the twelve editions of his Systema Naturae (1758). Although Linnaeus is not considered a major figure in
the advancement of ornithology, in 1758 he chose a name for
the Greater bird-of-paradise in use until this day: Paradisaea
apoda, footless bird of paradise. It is only one example for the
lasting influence of his methods, nomenclature, and schematic
visualizations to subsequent natural history publishing, books
about birds included.36 A cabinet with movable herbarium
shelves developed in Uppsala, Sweden, formed a central innovation that enabled him to draw conclusions between his botanical collections and his taxonomical tables on the page:
whenever new plant samples were added it was possible to create a space for them in the tentatively right place—while
aiming to develop and publish a rank-based—even somewhat
static—taxonomic system. [Figs. 06, 07]