A monograph of the lories, or brush-tongued parrots, composing the family Loriidæ
Ex-coll. HENRY BRADLEY MARTIN
London: R.H. Porter, 1896. First edition, second issue.
Quarto (12 7/16” x 9 13/16”, 316mm x 250mm): a4 b-f4 g2 h1 B-C4 D4(D4+χ1) E-2B4 2C2 [$2 signed]. 126 leaves, pp. i-iv (title, imprint, dedication, blank) v-liii [1] (blank), 1-24 24A [1] (blank) 25-183 [1] (blank) 2183 [1] (blank) 185-193 [1] (blank). (=liv, 198) With 4 chromolithographed maps and 61 hand-colored lithographed plates by Keulemans.
Bound in the publisher’s brown buckram with the title gilt to the front board. On the spine, title, author and bookseller (Quaritch, indicating the second issue) gilt. Top edge of the text-block gilt.
The front hinge starting at the bottom. A little peripheral fraying. Lightly evenly tanned. With the bookplate of H. Bradley Martin to the front paste-down.
St. George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900) is now remembered mostly as a villain; he was an esteemed biologist who came to reject Darwinian evolution — he published a pointedly-titled On the Genesis of Species in 1871 — as incompatible with his Catholic faith, and then came to be interdicted by the church. Following his 1890 Canidae, Mivart turned his attention to the Loriidae (though in modern taxonomy they are called the Loriinae, a sub-family of the psittacine birds), parrots with small structures (papillae) on the tips of their tongues that allow them to consume nectar and pollen in addition to their broader diet of insects and fruits. These brightly-colored parrots live in the South Pacific, from Australia to the Marquesas in the east and the Carolines in the north.
The brilliantly-colored plates are by and after Johannes Gerardus Keulemans (1842–1912), the preeminent natural history artist of the Victorian era. Keulemans was enticed to leave Leiden for London by Richard Bowdler Sharpe (who would go on to be director of the British Museum), and was highly-sought by the great bird book authors of the day, including Buller, Dresser, Elliot, Godman, Mathews, Rothschild, Seebohm and Sharpe. Arader handles a great many of his original watercolors.
Henry Bradley Martin (1906–1988), an heir to the Phipps steel fortune, studied at Christ Church Oxford and, with access to the great booksellers of the United Kingdom, built one of the formidable libraries of the XXc (including, simply for example, George Washington’s copy of The Federalist). His library, including “a virtually complete collection of the classic illustrated [bird] books from the sixteenth century onwards” (preface) was disbursed over nine sales at Sotheby’s New York in 1989 (the present item was lot 166 in part II of the sale, “Magnificent Color-Plate Ornithology” 7 June).
Ayer/Zimmer 439; Nissen, IVB 640; Sitwell, Fine Bird Books p. 94.
Item #JLR0798
Price: $14,000