It’s the RSPB’s Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend so here on a new look at old books we’ll be doing a bit of counting of our own. First, though, let’s meet the birds – the ones that live between the covers of books like this.
They look pretty dull but don’t turn away – the plain plumage hides a spectacular treat. These books are parrots in blackbird’s clothing. Each one contains 30 hand-coloured plates of birds and when they were issued these humble looking books were as zappy as an i-pad and just as coveted. They’re part of Sir William Jardine’s Naturalist Library and some of the most significant books of their time.
Like a nightingale these plain covers hide a secret; each one has thirty hand-coloured plates of British birds.
For a start that gilt border and title on the spine was very flash indeed. Putting gilt onto leather was nothing new; neither was the cloth covering on these boards. Getting gilt onto the cloth was another matter. It could be done by experienced craftsmen but this was expensive and keeping costs down was an important part of Jardine’s venture. He was a man with a plan to bring coloured natural history to the masses – the newly burgeoning masses of educated middle class readers who couldn’t possibly afford the incredibly pricy alternatives. Happily in 1832 The Imperial Arming Press came along and books never looked the same again. A few hours training were all that was required and after that anyone could make a shiny gilt cover every minute or so – and flog the book for just six shillings a pop.
Jardine began to issue his Naturalist’s Library in 1833 and at that price it was an immediate success. Never had so much colour been within reach of so many people for such a low cost. An army of nature enthusiasts caught the nat. hist. bug and it’s impossible to calculate just how many important discoveries owed their origin to this series of books. There are forty in all, issued from 1833 until 1843, and feature new discoveries from around the world as well as the more humble home grown beasts shown here.
Hand colouring, by the way, is one of the great untold stories of book collecting. Most novice collectors plainly refuse to believe that a book with hand coloured plates can be had for twenty quid or so but it’s true. Of course a lot depends on content and condition but hand colouring is actually nothing special. Why? Because until colour printing was perfected all books were hand coloured. It was routine, a job, par for the course – yet today virtually nothing is known about the industry. And industry it was, as a simple calculation reveals.
This book has thirty plates, each hand coloured. The first print run would have been at least 10,000 as the series was well into its stride by this time. Those 300,000 plates were coloured by a platoon of colourists, almost certainly adolescents, using gallons of paint and hundreds of brushes. And that’s one book, in one town, in one month. For the whole series the sum is 40×30x10,000, which makes 12,000,000. And the series was reissued by various publishers for the rest of the century, at least five of them, which makes…
Each image is a unique watercolour illustration. Somewhere on the paper is the fingerprint of the artist...
Mind boggling, isn’t it? Don’t forget that these books represent an invisibly small fraction of all coloured books. We all know all about the chimney sweeps, miners, maids and boot boys but they’re a historical footnote compared to the numbers of people required to do all that colouring. There were literally billions of plates produced until colour printing began to take over in the middle part of the century. How much did the artists earn? How did they work? Did all of them do all of a bird like this or was the plate passed along, one person doing the red, another the green and so on?
Nobody knows.
There are four volumes of British Birds in the Naturalist’s Library. You can buy copies of them here but frankly I wouldn’t advise it – go to a bookfair and choose one carefully. These old books are fragile and hidden behind those careful internet descriptions lurk dogs, not bird books. Beware also of reprints and rebinds, some of them absolutely repulsive. And don’t buy one of those single plates for £50 either – it’s a con. You can get a whole bookful for that at practically any bookfair you go to.
I’ll be writing a great deal more about these books soon in Book and Magazine Collector.
Any comments or information about hand-colouring? Please get in touch...
We demand justice for the families of anonymous print hand-colourers. Join our campaign now and sign the petition at http://www.jfaphc.co.uk Only a written apology from the Prime Minister will do!