A MEETING OF RIVALS 217 
at a salary of $900 a year. Samuel F. Bradford, the 
publisher of this work, soon became interested in Wil- 
son’s projected American Ornithology and agreed to 
publish it. It became the ambition of both author and 
publisher to produce the work in a superior style, and 
to make it as perfect and complete an American prod- 
uct as possible. Only the pigments used in coloring 
some of the plates were imported from Europe.° 
Wilson issued in April, 1807, an elaborate prospectus 
of his proposed Ornithology, in which he stated that the 
completed work would comprise ten volumes, to cost 
$120, and that it would be illustrated by plates, engraved 
and colored by hand, after the manner of a carefully 
prepared sample which was issued with the printed an- 
nouncement. In September, 1808, as already intimated, 
the first volume of the American Ornithology” appeared 
lished at Philadelphia, in forty-one quarto volumes of text and six volumes 
of plates, by Samuel F. Bradford and the Messrs. Murray, Fairman & 
Company, 1810-1824. 
»“The types,” said Charles Robert Leslie, “which were very beautiful, 
were cast in America, and though at that time paper was largely imported, 
he [Mr. Bradford] determined that the paper should be of American 
manufacture; and I remember that Ames, the paper maker, carried his 
patriotism so far that he declared that he would use only American rags 
in making it.” (Autobiographical Recollections, Boston, 1860.) 
The American Ornithology: or, the Natural History of the Birds 
of the United States: Illustrated with Plates Engraved and Colored from 
Original Drawings taken from Nature, by Alexander Wilson, was published 
in nine imperial quarto volumes by Messrs. Bradford and Inskeep, at 
Philadelphia, 1808-1814. Each volume contained nine plates and from 
100 to 167 pages of text, exclusive of prefatory and other matter. The 
eighth volume, which was nearly ready for press at the time of the 
author’s death, was edited by George Ord, Wilson’s friend and executor; 
the final volume, which was wholly by Ord, and which was issued in 
the same year, contained a life of Wilson. After the appearance of the 
initial volume, the edition was extended to 500 copies and the first volume 
was entirely reset. Ord’s life of Wilson was expanded for a three-volume 
edition of the Ornithology, and from oversheets of this work was pro- 
duced as a separate volume in 1828 (see Note, Vol. I, p. 223). 
Wilson’s published lists of subscribers show 449 names, calling for 458 
copies, more than half of which were taken by residents of Pennsylvania, 
New York and Louisiana; 70 were subscribed for in Philadelphia, chiefly 
by business men, artists, and “those in the middle class of society;” New 
