GOULD, John.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains. First edition of Gould's first book, the rare issue with the backgrounds coloured; in a letter to Lord Derby, Gould wrote "You will probably recollect that in my first work... neither the plants or Backgrounds were coloured; In order to render the Series of my Publications complete... I have had those parts coloured in the few copies I have left" (reprinted in Sauer).In 1828 Gould had been appointed "bird-stuffer" to the Zoological Society and when "a collection of birds from the Himalayan mountains arrived at the society's museum Gould conceived the idea of publishing a volume of imperial folio sized hand-coloured lithographs of the eighty species... Gould's friend and mentor N. A. Vigors supplied the text. Elizabeth Gould made the drawings and transferred them to the large lithographic stones. Having failed to find a publisher, Gould undertook to publish the work himself; it appeared in twenty monthly parts, four plates to a part, and was completed ahead of schedule. With this volume Gould initiated a format of publishing that he was to continue for the next fifty years" (ODNB).The list of subscribers runs to 298 names headed by the king and queen and including John James Audubon, the naturalist Sir William Jardine, the novelist Frederick Marryat, and Edward Lear ("Lear, Mr. E., A.L.S. Albany-street, Regent's-park"), noting Lear's recently acquired position as an associate of the Linnean Society. In her acclaimed biography of

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