A natural history of English song-birds, including such foreign birds as are usually brought over and esteemed for their singing: Their proper Management, Diseases, and Cures. To which are added, figures of the Cock, Hen, and Egg of each species, exactly copied from nature, By Mr. Eleazar Albin, and curiously engraven on copper. A new addition corrected, with several improvements, under the article of canary-birds
London: T. Lowndes and S. Bladon, 1779.
Octavo (7 1/16” x 4 1/4”, 180mm x 109mm): binder’s blank, A2 B-G8 H8(–H8), binder’s blank [$4 signed]. 57 leaves, pp. [iv] (title, blank, 2pp. to the reader), 1 2-107, [iii] (3pp. index). With an engraved frontispiece and 23 engraved plates.
Bound in modern half morocco over marbled boards (by Fitterer). On the spine, five raised bands flanked with double blind fillets. Author and title gilt to black morocco in the second panel.
Tanned generally, with a little offsetting. Lacking the final leaf of advertisements (H8).
Albin (d. 1742) is something of a shadowy figure — if an indisputable important one — in British natural history illustration. Perhaps of German extraction, Albin nevertheless insinuated himself with the British aristocracy. His magnum opus, the 1731 Natural History of Birds, established the British tradition of illustrated bird-books that would continue into the nineteenth century with Gould and Audubon.
Like the Natural History of Birds, the English song-birds was immensely popular; from its first edition (1737; this is perhaps the seventh and last edition) it spoke to the particularly eighteenth-century fascination with domesticating exotic birds. As the frontispiece shows, song-birds had long been associated with courting lovers in particular, and so this treatise on their keeping and breeding will have had practical as well as theoretical applications — as demonstrated in the illustration of hen, cock and, often, egg.
Anker 7; Lowndes 25; Mullens, p. 14.
Item #JLR0279
Price: $3,500