Do you Recommend 



..BIRDS.. 



to your Friends?, 



If not, have you done all the good to-day you can? 



Read the following editorial from " Current Literature," January, 1898: 



THE NEW AUDUBON, 



It is one of the peculiar features of the development of the art of printing that the more 

 mechanical the processes of reproduction are becoming the more artistic they seem. Human toil 

 it now appears, is not a pre-requisite to finished beauty. The old engravers spent hours, days, and 

 years of labor in the production of plates which do not begin to suggest qualities which are to-day 

 obtained in a few moments of time by the aid of the photographer's camera. A case in point was 

 the production in the early half of the century of a work of great variety and enormously costly 

 manufacture— James Audubon's monumental Birds of America. Audubon himself gave up his 

 life to the collection of the necessary data for this work. Its plates engraved on steel, were years 

 in making. The best English engravers of the day were employed, and the resulting prints, made 

 in colors fr<jm drawings by Audubon, represented the very highest perfection of the art of printing. 

 The original subscription price of the work was in the hundreds of dollars, and there were there- 

 fore few who could count themselves among the possible possessors of so expensive a luxury. The 

 tomes themselves were ponderous things, elephant folios, and the plates were life-sized reproduc- 

 tions of the various birds to be found throughout our continent. It seemed, indeed, as if the last 

 word had been said upon that subject, and to this day Audubon's Birds of America has been at once 

 a classic and a creation unrivaled in the literature of the natural sciences. As the century closes 

 however, we find this epoch making work more than rivaled by purely mechanical processes, and 

 an energetic publishing house in Chicago issuing a monthly magazine designed especially for the 

 young, and sold at a very modest price, in which the plates are as far superior to Audubon's book 

 as that was to all those that preceded it. Birds is the title of the Chicago magazine, and each month 

 it presents eight full-page plates in color, which are so accurate, so delicate in tone, so true to 

 texture and so natural, that the engravings in Audubon seem like stilted charts, or coarse maps oj 

 bird-plumage in comparison. The Audubon plates represent the perfection of hand work, as 

 against new and purely mechanical processes ; but like the history of all modern industries, the 

 handwork must give place to the machine. And, on the whole, the machine proves to be the 

 people's friend. It has wondrously reduced the cost of the necessities of life, and is making 

 marked incursions into the territory of our luxuries. For a few pennies we can today be the 

 possessors of a work which is tor all practical purposes superior to the great Audubon. In expla- 

 nation of this seemingly miraculous advance, it should be said that while the Audubon will always 

 maintain an artistic pre-eminence from the fact that the plates were made from ,the drawings 

 themselves of the great naturalist, no amount of humaii skill can directly attain the truth of color 

 and form which can now be obtained through the new three-color process of photo-etching. 

 Though but a doubtful success in other directions, this new color method has been peculiarly 

 successful in the reproduction of still-life subjects, where objects can be left exposed for long 

 periods to the camara without danger of changes of position. Collections of birds, or pottery, or 

 stuffs are thus seen to be specially adaptable to it. The enterprising Chicago publishers have 

 taken praiseworthy advantage of the facts, and the results are so surprisingly perfect that our 

 counsel to every bird lover or naturalist is to make early acquaintance with their exquisite 

 prints.— /^row Current Literature, February i8g8. 



