Thorburn’s Birds!

Our book today is a pretty thing to look at: Thorburn’s Birds, a 1982 Mermaid Books reprint of the massive 1915 opus by Archibald Thorburn, British Birds. This Mermaid edition is just a selection from that vast work, although a very good one (I’m guessing a copy of the original full-size four-volume set won’t be showing up at the Brattle Bookshop any time soon, although I could probably find such a copy at the Antiquarian Book Fair this autumn, going for more money than I have just lying around), and its editor, James Fisher, has gone through it carefully, pruning Thorburn’s occasional inaccuracies of description and simplifying Thorburn’s typically Victorian baroque complexities.

Thorburn was born in 1860 and lived until 1935, but he remained all his life a very anachronistic person, preferring the stiffest collars, the finest note paper, and the best painting materials. And he was a perfectionist, something that’s abundantly clear from these beautiful bird compositions. Fisher calls these “the alivest birds he ever drew,” and he’s entirely right. But paging through this handy paperback volume, I noticed again that it isn’t just the birds that are alive: Thorburn is marvellously adept at using background settings to convey atmosphere, something the other bird-illustrators at the turn of the 20th century sometimes slighted. His snow scenes feel cold; and even on the flat page, his beach scenes gust with breezes.

British Birds was done at the peak of Thorburn’s career, when he was already a famous illustrator, revered by ornithologists for his accuracy and loved by the bird-fanciers of England (and elsewhere – a knockoff edition of British Birds not all that dissimilar to this Mermaid edition sold well in Boston shops in the 1920s). I agree with Fisher that this book proved Thorburn was one of the greatest bird-artists of the 20th century just as his earlier books had proved him one of the best of the 19th.

The pictures are accompanied by fairly dry accounts of the birds’ ancestry, distribution, and current population, but this is hardly the kind of book a British birder would take into the field. British Birds was always intended to be a grand summation for the study or the library, not an identification guide (although Thorburn himself was fairly insistent on tramping out to see his subjects in their natural habitats), and it was esteemed in its own day as art worth having even if you voyaged no farther than the bottom of your garden. Certainly this abridged version will make a neat addition to my own always-growing clutch of bird-books, even though the birds Thorburn saw have been pooping in Heaven for a century now.