Inter Folia, Aves

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.

Here, the European bird book stands out as a particularly multivalent publication subspecies. Field naturalists, bird collection curators, and illustrators had to join forces to create early ornithological monographs of bird species only partially known, that is, perhaps never witnessed in their natural habitat by the person describing them to a world of curious readers. Indeed, over several centuries the bird book was a space where zoological taxonomies were proposed, arranged, negotiated, and sometimes overwritten, thus constituting an intellectual device to record, construct, attribute, order, and re-display nature in a cultural format. As historian of science Emma Spary has emphasized with regards to the gradual codification of ornithology, “a species can be made manifest in three ways, as specimen or technological object in a collection, as description (text) or verbal object, and finally as illustration or visual object.”⁸ Rather than embodying “true” nature, bird books derive from an entangling of birds, things, and words; with Vinciane Despret we could say they are examples of “fabricating science.”⁹ And because in doing this, bird books purposefully activate multiple levels of perception and meaning at once, I consider them curatorialeditorial devices. They are also tools for the “production of nature”¹⁰ and, in that context, bear an inherent coloniality held in place by detailed systems of taxonomy and reductive avian display.


Flights of Fancy – Departures

For centuries, tropical birds of paradise were known in Europe merely as dead objects. Bird skins—imperfectly preserved, with bodies incomplete—were brought back as awe-inspiring discoveries by colonial explorers. The first five specimens were carried by Juan Sebastián Elcano upon returning from circumnavigating the globe on the late Magellan’s vessel Victoria in 1522. Albeit legless, these bird-of-paradise skins stirred a sensation at the Spanish court.¹¹ Lacking the field experience of observing the animals in their habitat, Europeans for a long time told themselves an exotic and ethereal mythology. These stories incorporated anecdotes from the native hunters in the endemic islands, who claimed that the birds could never be caught alive yet were easily shot when landing on the ground to drink.¹² As a result, people in Europe believed that these birds were paradisiacal creatures that lived in the heavens and only ever landed on Earth when they were about to die. While the legendary sixteenth-century skins have long withered and disappeared, the allure and curious speculation projected onto them remain reflected in some depictions of that period.¹³ These images show strange, feathered creatures that undulate among the clouds, a little more piscine perhaps than avian—for they lack spread wings and, as mentioned above, usually have no feet.

The oldest such woodcut image known was published in 1555 by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) in the avifauna volume of his Historia Animalium, entitled De Avium Natura. Most pictures in this book show the birds in profile (usually perched on a branch or rock and appearing relatively alive and healthy). The entry on “De Paradisea” however models its bird from a severed and stuffed, and anatomically quite deformed bird-of-paradise skin. The caption below the Paradisea image states that the depiction is based on correspondence with a humanist from Nuremberg.¹⁴ Indeed, even though Gessner is considered one of the first Renaissance scholars to ever compile a specimen collection for the study of natural history it is unclear whether Gessner ever had a chance to see a bird-of-paradise skin with his own eyes. They were rarities in Europe at that time. But incorporating accounts second-hand was not uncommon. Copying from other manuscripts had been routine in the hand-scribed publishing culture of the Middle Ages; to compensate for the paucity of personal experience, this practice easily survived the introduction of the printing press. Gessner in general relayed many scholarly sources, including the writings of Pliny the Elder.¹⁵His entry on the Paradisea includes references to one of the very first written descriptions made about it—a report from 1521 by Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage.¹⁶ Finding all this material must have been a great passion; the German ornithologist Erwin Stresemann (1889–1972) characterized Gessner as a voracious reader who “combed through classical and medieval literature with unparalleled thoroughness for apposite references […] and […] managed to fill 806 closely printed folio pages with the discussion of only 180 species of birds.”¹⁷ His montage of a tale about the birds of paradise imagines fantastical things such as the male and female birds brooding their eggs in a cavity between their bodies while hovering high in the air, bound together by the male’s skinny tail feathers.