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Flipping the Bird
“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.
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 building for a permanent exhibition of the collection, and pages of the bird folio will be turned once a week.”
In September 2011, a brand-new specialized case, made of UV glass and steel, was ordered from Germany under the direction of Rick Ring, the Head of the Watkinson Library Special Collections, allowing Birds of America to be on permanent display in Trinity's Watkinson Library reading room.
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 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 has been completed only once, in Fall 2022, at which time the staff retrieved the first volume to restart the set.
Sources
Wikipedia: The Birds of America
NEWS from the Libraries at Trinity College, Fall 2011, vol. 5, issue 1.
The Bibliophile's Lair - Exhibitions, 2011.
“30,000 Book of Audubon Drawings Placed on Exhibition At Trinity,” The Hartford Courant, 01/28/1951.