Inter Folia, Aves
Anna-Sophie Springer
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. Anderson 1
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.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/410b4d948855add889eb792165826fc91f9c3861f105704c60495f8423bd934c/Fig1_Nuremberg_chronicles_-_f_4v_5h-day-of-creation.png)
Fig. 01. The Schedel’sche Weltchronik or Nuremberg Chronicle published in 1493 is an illustrated incunabulum and world historical encyclopedia that is considered one of the best-preserved early printed books famous for integrating image and text as narrative
means. It was produced in Nuremberg under the leadership of author Hartmann Schedel, (a doctor and book collector) while involving a group of artists including Albrecht Dürer. The image reproduced here depicts and artistic interpretation of the Old Testament’s “Fifth Day of Creation,” in Genesis 1:20–1:23, which begins with the phrase: “And God
said: ‘Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” Reproduction from Wikimedia Commons.
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.
![](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/527fdd0ff308256c76b60c4d4b2dd7d3ee51f8f73f350ed0e301653f61620677/crop-Fig2_Gessner_Paradiesvogel1555_ASpringer.jpg)
Fig. 02. The bird-of-paradise illustration from Conrad Gessner, Icones Avium Omnium, Quae in Historia Avium Conradi Gesneri Describuntur Cum Nomenclaturis Singulorum (Zurich: Froschauer, 1555). Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Halle;
VD16 G 1732.