Audubon, John James:

$175,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

THE BIRDS OF AMERICA, FROM DRAWINGS MADE IN THE UNITED STATES AND THEIR TERRITORIES. The spectacular Levy copy of the first octavo edition of Audubon's "Great National Work." This is the first complete edition and the first American edition. The work is one of the "most beautiful, popular, and important natural history books published in America in the nineteenth century...representing the best of pre–Civil War American lithography and giving Audubon the opportunity finally to display his scholarship and genius to a large American audience for the first time" (Tyler).The plates, here accompanied by the text for the first time, were reduced and variously modified from the Havell engravings in the double-elephant folio. Seven new species are figured and seventeen others, previously described in the Ornithological Biography but not illustrated, were also shown for the first time. Audubon may have been prompted to publish the reduced version of his double-elephant folio by the appearance in 1839 of John Kirk Townsend's rival Ornithology of the United States; or, as he writes in the introduction to the present work, he may have succumbed to public demand and his wish that a work similar to his large work should be published but "at such a price, as would enable every student or lover of nature to place it in his Library."The first edition of the octavo work is certainly the most famous and accessible of all the great American color plate books, and now represents the only realisti

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