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John
James Audubon
In addition to being the
most famous bird painter of his time,
John James Audubon was a respected
naturalist and a prolific writer who
witnessed and helped to document the
rapidly changing frontier of early 19th
century America.
The
Audubon Octavos
My interest in the
documentary and in this academic
conference stems from the Audubon
Octavos. The seven-volume set, Birds of
America; and the three-volume set,
Quadrupeds of North America, were
published by John James Audubon and his
family between 1839 and 1856. They are a
manageable one-eighth the dimension of
the great double elephant folios.
A matched
10-volume set, bought by my father when
in college, stood invitingly in our
living room bookcase as I was growing
up. The 650 hand-colored prints were
special but what turned me on to
Audubon, and, as I learned later, set
the volumes apart from any other work by
him, was inclusion of his written
descriptions of each bird and animal --
more than 3,000 pages of scientific
observation and personal commentary.
Today, few are
aware that Audubon made major
contributions to natural history and
ornithology. Even fewer know that, in
colorful prose, he captured scenes from
daily life on the American frontier over
a tumultuous 15-year period.
This story
deserves retelling. The documentary film
genre is made to order and Larry Hott
and Diane Garey are prizewinning
documentary filmmakers.
The Audubon
Octavos themselves deserve discussion.
Only here can one find Audubon the
artist and writer. But complete sets
still in private hands are being
acquired by certain dealers who then
'break' them, remove individual prints,
and discard the text. Selected prints
sell for several thousand dollars. The
asking price for one particularly
popular print Is $3,500.
Audubon Octavos
may not survive this pressure from the
market place – pressure that may only
increase once the Hott-Garey American
Masters/PBS documentary is broadcast to
an audience projected to be over 12
million.
How to raise
awareness of the Audubon Octavos and
preserve remaining sets will be a focus
of the roundtable.
Roswell Eldridge, M.D.
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