Amazon Parrots.

£1,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

A signed limited edition issue of Elizabeth Butterworth's (b.1949) magnificently illustrated Amazon Parrots, with 28 colourplates on Mellotex paper from the St. Vincent to the Imperial Amazon. 'Elizabeth Butterworth is not the first British artist to succeed in capturing on paper the brilliant plumage of Macaws, but with Edward Lear she must be considered one of the best. Certainly she is without rival this century. Her success stems partly from intense powers of observation and party from an encyclopaedic knowledge of her subject. She has bred Macaws, looked after them, fed them and listened to their noisy antics from the first call of the morning to the last shriek at night. She has sketched them in the privacy of her back garden and in their natural state in the rain forests of South America. She has examined the skins of dead birds in natural history museums in London and New York and she could tell you the number of feathers in a tail and the size of a beak to the nearest millimetre' (Ian Dunlop). First edition, limited issue, number 300 of 500 copies signed by the illustrator and author; folio (46.5 x 37 cm); 28 colour plates on Mellotex paper tipped in (including frontispiece), bookplate to front free endpaper, loose paper slip; publisher's red silken cloth, housed in black cloth clamshell case, paper title-piece to spine, very minor fading, a fine copy.

• Binding: Hardcover

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