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Somerville and New England History Collection
 
The image at left is from the 1856 printing of John James Audubon's
The Birds of America, a groundbreaking work of American ornithology.
It would be hard to overstate the amount of work necessary to
create such a book in an age before photography. Audubon traveled
all over the United States, carefully observing birds and then
shooting them, stuffing them, and using wire armatures to put
them in lifelike poses. He then made drawings and paintings
of the birds, producing the most lifelike images of wildlife
ever seen up to that time. Birds of America is of interest not
only in its own right as an important work of natural history
but because it is an example of a work published by subscription-a
common process for publishing books in nineteenth-century America.
People committed to buying the book before publication. Once
the publisher had enough subscribers to make printing the book
profitable, it was published. Boston-area residents constituted
one-fifth of all his initial American subscribers. According
to an early biographer, "Audubon could never say enough
in praise of Bostonians." |
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