Genera of birds
London: B. White, 1781. Second edition, first illustrated.
Quarto (9 3/8” x 7 11/16”, 237mm x 195mm): a2 B-N4 [$2 signed]. 50 leaves, pp. [4] (advertisement, blank, 2pp. dedication) i ii-xxv [1] (explanation of the figure on the title-page), 1 2-68, [2] (2pp. index). [=xxx, 68, ii] With an engraved title-page and 15 engravings numbered I-XVI, with III and IV being on a single plate. Collated complete against Anker, Ayer and Nissen.
Bound in contemporary quarter sprinked calf over marbled boards (re-backed to style). On the spine, 5 raised bands. Title gilt to the second panel, date gilt to the tail.
Re-backed to style, with the joints strengthened. Rubbed, with some patches of wear at the front board. Offset at the turn-ins and the plates, with some scattered foxing. The odd leaf foxed opposite a plate. Ink ownership signature of “J. L. Philips/ 1790” in an old hand, with (his?) shelf-mark (“P—4to.3”) on the front paste-down, above the letterpress bookplate of “T.J.L. Brooke,/ Mere Hall.” Ex-libris of William Abbott Pluemer — sometime mounted atop the signature and bookplate, with adhesive residue — laid in.
Thomas Pennant (1726–1798) was a naturalist and antiquary, writing both local histories and major surveys of the zoology and botany of Britain as well as India and the arctic. This multifarious Welshman was also in correspondence with the scholars of his day, and is increasingly the object of study in the history of science (see Edwin Rose’s Reading the World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), based in part on Arader’s holdings of Pennant’s published work as well as his working papers). The present work, as explained in the advertisement, “was written in the year 1772, and presented to Doctor Robert Ramsay, Professor of Natural History in Edinburgh, for the use of the class over which he presided. He printed one impression in the following year; and then resigned to me the copy.” This isn’t quite true, as a handful of examples of that 1773 edition (Edinburgh: Balfour and Smellie, pace Nissen, IVB 712, which claims London) are held in institutional libraries. The present edition is the first to be illustrated (save the engraved title-page, which features a similar (reversed) diagram).
The work is a text-book — “genera” is the plural of “genus” — for students of the burgeoning field of ornithology, beginning with a definition of a bird (“an animal covered with feathers; furnished with a bill; having two wings, and only two legs; with the faculty, except in very few instances, of removing itself from palce to place through the air,” p. i). The illustrations depict the birds of Britain as well as further afield, including the crested manakin (pl. X, opposite p. 30) of South America and the global pelican (pl. XV).
J. L. Philips, who acquired the book just nine years after its publication and was perhaps its binding owner, is elusive, though the inclusion of the shelfmark suggests that he had a large collection. Thomas John Langford Brooke (1820–1865) inhabited the old manor of Mere Hall, some 12 miles southwest of Manchester. His father, Thomas Langford Brooke, was a member of parliament, and the family generally prosperous through estates in Cheshire and Antigua. William Abbott Pluemer (1917–2005) was born in New Jersey and was an airman who served in WW2 as well as in the Korean War, including a four-year tour in England — during which, presumably, he acquired the present volume.
Anker 396, Ayer-Zimmer 489; Nissen, IVB 712.
Item #JLR0744
Price: $650