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?

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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]