Description
Mark Catesby's The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands
These charming, imperial folio size engravings are from the 1777 publishing of Mark Catesby's Piscium, Serpentum, Insectorum, aliorumque nonullorum Animalium. This edition was published in Nuremberg by Johann Joseph Fleischmann. Nicholaus Friedrich Eisenberger and Georg Lichtensteiger issued the reprinting of volume two of Catesby's work in 1750. It was so popular that it led to a second edition in 1777 from which these prints come. Unlike the Seligmann edition, which was issued in a smaller format, this printing is imperial folio. It is the same size as the first, second, and 1771 edition. Paper and coloring compare favorably with the 1771 edition which was printed on Whatman woven paper (which had a tendency to brown and become brittle). Mark Catesby produced the first colored plate, natural history work of American flora and fauna. It made a great contribution to natural sciences in the 1700s, and represented a great first in American natural history. Mark Catesby was a well-known naturalist born in England in 1682. He spent 10 years of his life in the American colonies observing the native species of plants and animals. Attempting to save time and money, Catesby was the first to incorporate plant life and birds on the same page. Because Catesby was too poor at the time to hire engravers, he studied under Joseph Goupy, learning to etch plates himself to save money and ensure accuracy. The result is his wonderfully detailed work featuring hundreds of American species giving the Old World a glimpse of the World beyond.