Natural Histories. Extraordinary Rare Book Selections from the American Museum of Natural History Library

There’s no shame in admitting that what first attracted me to this book was its cover, or rather, its presentation pack − a colour-printed boxfile enclosing the A4 paperback volume itself and forty loose-leaf duplicate plates for the owner to shuffle or display as he pleases. Full marks for presentation. Although several of the forty authors contributing succinct essays to the volume are museum curators, most are specialists from the research library of the American Museum of Natural History in New York – appropriately so, since it is books rather than specimens that form its organizing units, giving these Natural Histories their particular perspective. Each of the chosen subjects forms a milestone in the progress of exploration and understanding of the natural world, extended here on occasion to include both the solar system (Johannes Bayer’s Uranometria of 1603) and the human inhabitants of the New World (Theodor de Bry’s images of America, published between 1590 and 1634).

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