Birds and INature 



8 Bound Volumes, with 376 Colored Plates. 



Each 244 pp., and from 40 to 60 full pag-e plates in natural colors, cloth, $1.50. 



^FFflRI f^FFFIf "^^^ ^ volumes, cloth, for $8.00, or the 8 volumes bound 

 Jl LLiilL Ul 1 Lll in 4 double volumes, half morocco, for $8.00. There 

 are 376 plates in these volumes, each of special value: All of the unbound 

 mag-azines, 1897, 1898, 1899, 1900, for $4.40; the 376 plates only $3.76. You 

 can afford to 'order these books on the following- recommendation: 



A 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 eng-ravers spent hours, days and years of labor in the production of 

 plates which do not begin to sug'g'est 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 manu- 

 facture — 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 from 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 therefore 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 reproductions 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 pro- 

 cesses, 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 and Nature 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 en- 

 gravin£;s in Audubon seem like stilted charts, or coarse maps of bird-plutnage in co^nparison. 

 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 feiv pen?iies ive can to-day be the 

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

 planation 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 human 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 sub- 

 jects, where objects can be left exposed for long periods to the camera 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 publisher has 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 these exquisite prints. — Froin Current 

 Literature. 



/\. \A/. TVVU/VVRORD, F*ufc>lishe^r. 



203 yvilchlgan f\\/&nti&, Chicago. 



