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This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- flipping_the_bird [2023/03/01 21:54] – [Flipping the Bird] amatava
+++ flipping_the_bird [2023/05/16 19:06] (current) – [Flipping the Bird] bant05
@@ Line 2: / Line 2: @@
 ====== Flipping the Bird ======
-[{{ :birds.jpg?400|//Birds of America// in its first public case, 1958.}}]
+[{{ :birdsofamerica.jpg?400|The first public display case for //Birds of America//, ca. 1958. Photo credit: [[https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.33120260|Trinity College Archives]]}}]
-[{{ ::birds_of_america_.jpg?400|Image of the current Audubon case when it was newly installed in 2011}}]
+[{{ ::birds_of_america_.jpg?400|The current Audubon display case when it was newly installed in 2011. Photo credit: Trinity College Archives}}]
-“Flipping the Bird” refers to the weekly turning of a page from John James Audubon’s book //Birds of America,// a field guide on documenting and identifying birds.
+“Flipping the Bird” refers to the weekly turning of a page from John James Audubon’s folio //Birds of America,// a field guide on documenting and identifying birds.
 //Birds of America// is an elephant folio composed of 435 life-size illustrations in four volumes. The size of the drawings required the books to be large, about 39 by 26 inches. There are less than 120 complete sets remaining worldwide, all published between 1826 and 1839.
-Trinity's set is especially rare not only due to its completeness, but because it was owned by the engraver, Robert Havell, and it is debated whether this copy is one he kept aside due to being "finest of all," or due to imperfections, as is commonly believed. Many of the pages carry watermarks from 1838, as discovered by Special Collections Librarian Eric Johnson-DeBaufre. After Havell's death in 1878, the folio was acquired by Dr. Gurdon W. Russell, Class of 1834, who donated it to the College in 1900.
+Trinity's set is especially rare not only due to its completeness, but because it was owned by the engraver, Robert Havell. After Havell's death in 1878, the folio was acquired by Dr. Gurdon W. Russell, Class of 1834, who donated it to the College in 1900.
+Audubon scholars Waldemar Fries and Susanne Low have each attested to the high quality of Trinity’s copy, Fries proclaiming it “probably the finest extant” example of Audubon’s work ((Fries, p. 213)) and Low stating that it “has perhaps the most subtle and true-to-life colors” of the surviving copies. ((Low, p. 14)) In 2023 Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian Eric Johnson-DeBaufre did an analysis of the Havell copy’s paper. Although it has sometimes been thought that Havell laid aside copies of the plates as they were printed between 1826 and 1839, watermark and other evidence suggests that Havell printed the work in its entirety in 1838 shortly before his move to America in 1839.
 Due to its value and size, //Birds of America// was only brought out for public view for special occasions, such as in 1948 to celebrate Trinity's 125th anniversary and to observe the centennial of Audubon's death in 1951. In an interview with the //Hartford Courant// that year, Donald B. Engley, associate librarian, stated that "a case will be provided in the new Trinity [[library|Library]] building for a permanent exhibition of the collection, and pages of the bird folio will be turned once a week."
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 Once a week at a designated time, a Watkinson librarian turns one page of the book, revealing a new bird. Visitors are encouraged to come to the reading room to watch the event in person, though the Trinity Library [[https://www.instagram.com/trincoll_library/|Instagram account]] allows the ceremony to be watched virtually; videos of the event are posted weekly.
-It takes more than eight years to flip through the complete set while abiding by the one-page-a-week system, and since its inception in 2011, the full set was only completed once, in Fall 2022, at which time the staff retrieved the first volume to restart the set.
+It takes more than eight years to flip through the complete set while abiding by the one-page-a-week system, and since its inception in 2011, the full set has been completed only once, in fall 2022, at which time the staff retrieved the first volume to restart the set.
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 ===== Sources =====
-[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_of_America|The Birds of America]]
+[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_of_America|Wikipedia: The Birds of America]]
 [[https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/libnews/9/|NEWS from the Libraries at Trinity College]], Fall 2011, vol. 5, issue 1.
-[[http://commons.trincoll.edu/watkinson/tag/exhibitions/|The Bibliophiles Lair - Exhibitions]]
+[[http://commons.trincoll.edu/watkinson/tag/exhibitions/|The Bibliophile's Lair - Exhibitions]], 2011.
+Fries, Waldemar. The Double Elephant Folio: The Story of Audubon’s Birds of America. Amherst, MA: Zenaida Publishing, 2006.
+Low, Susanne. A Guide to Audubon’s Birds of America. New Haven: William Reese Co. and Donald A. Heald, 2002.
-"30,000 Book of Audubon Drawings Placed on Exhibition At Trinity," The //Hartford Courant//, 01/28/1951.
+"$30,000 Book of Audubon Drawings Placed on Exhibition At Trinity," //Hartford Courant//, 01/28/1951.
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