Indeed, before bird taxidermy was improved with the aid of arsenical soap by the end of the eighteenth century, bird specimens tended to be fragile and prone to decay.²⁹ In a certain way, this physical problem made handcrafted illustrations of birds on the page of a book a much more reliable means for conserving visual characteristics, especially about species endemic to other continents that hardly anyone working in natural history could behold. At the same time, these images themselves relied on aesthetic interpretation and changing values; they were also often created by combining impressions from several different specimens serving as models; sometimes they represented artistic amalgamations of both living and dead animals causing some rather strange discrepancies.³⁰ Thus, the illustrations must be considered as the results of potentially quite heterogeneous materials compiled and arranged to represent a legible form (i.e., a bird with a specific look and name). Here, the various sources used to codify a bird—its specimen as well as the respective visual and textual languages used to describe it and the taxonomic system and collection within which it was placed—all inflected and co-infuenced the process of shaping the scientific, artistic as well as curatorial-editorial notion of a species. As a special case of paginated exhibition but also a type of colonial space, the bird book thus permits the visibility of birds within the environment of a co-produced ornithological discourse.³¹ As early ornithologists assembled and distributed their knowledge about birds across the spectrum of bird specimens, bird pictures, and bird descriptions, the bird book became a kind of second-nature aviary—inter folia, aves.


Nature’s Modular Library

For the longest time the library—a much more ancient institution than the natural history museum—embodied the image of a storehouse of all knowledge about the world. As historian Lorraine Daston points out in her essay “The Sciences of the Archives,” some have argued that the more “hands-on” natural sciences, due to their inclination toward the newness of data, virtually manifested a disengagement with historical scholarship stored in books and libraries. She critiques this by showing that in fact there never was such a break—as if modern science no longer needed a recourse to the books and other knowledges. Architectural floorplans of nineteenth-century natural history institutions reconfirm that libraries did remain “at the heart” of most of their buildings even at a time when empiricism had fully developed. Yet, as disciplines were formed and parsed, institutions certainly reorganized the arrangements of their repositories; book and specimen collections were increasingly separated.³²