DENTON, Sherman Foote.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

As Nature Shows Them, Moths and Butterflies of the United States East of the Rocky Mountains. First edition, number 324 of 500 copies only, beautifully bound with apposite butterfly tooling. This painstakingly produced work features abundant illustrations printed using the lepidochromy technique refined by Denton: the scales of the insects' wings, with their vivid pigment, are directly transferred to the plates.Denton explains in the preface that "the making of such transfers is not original with me, but it took a good deal of experimenting to so perfect the process" (p. vi). Each printing required a new set of wings, so each illustration is unique and at least 50,000 specimens were needed to finish this edition. The bodies of the butterflies and moths were then printed from copper engravings and hand-coloured. Such innovation was nothing new to Denton (1856-1937), whose skills ranged from taxidermy to painting. With his three younger brothers, he founded the Denton Brothers Company, which specialized in naturalist collections. At the 1900 Paris exposition they won the gold medal for their butterfly displays after Sherman had patented a new mounting method. He also patented a novel way of preserving fish scales for the benefit of collectors and museums.

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