For me, books are sacred. You don’t tear out the pages or write on them or mar them in any way. That’s a no-no.
Imagine my horror when I came across sets of pages torn from an 1890 book on Pennsylvania birds. There were about 10-15 packs of pages neatly sealed in plastic, about 40 pages in each stack. Most of them had numbers on the outside of the packs, which I assume were inventory numbers of the dealer who owned them. There were also packs stripped from books about British and Irish mansions.
A dealer – or someone else – had apparently taken the Pennsylvania prints from the book “The Report on the Birds of Pennsylvania” by B.H. Warren. The book was published in 1890. I would consider it a book unworthy of being torn apart for its plates. I know what the dealer had in mind: Sell the individual images and make more money rather than selling the complete book. Maybe, maybe not.
Dealers know they have a huge market in bird lovers. They are among the largest group of hobbyists in the country. Even back-yard bird watchers would enjoy having these prints framed and hanging on their walls.
The images themselves were lovely, and the colors striking. Each page identified the birds and the plate number from the book. The pages were in very good condition.
The author, Benjamin Harris Warren, was the ornithologist for the Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture, working out of West Chester, Pa., according to the introduction to the book. I could find out little else about him. The report was commissioned by the state, the book said.
The book contained 100 color plates, some of which were copied from the small edition of J.J. Audubon’s “Birds of America” to save on costs, according to Warren’s introduction. He wrote that most were from his own collection.
Click here to view the plates and here to see the book in its entirety. Several websites mentioned Warren’s reproductions, adding that they were chromolithographs of the naturalist/orinthologist/painter’s octavo images.
Today, the state has a records committee that keeps a listing of its birds and encourages people to report rare species. There’s also a tip list for documenting them.
The asking price for a complete Warren book is pretty mixed. Booksellers on the site alibris.com had it going for $50 to $300. These included reproductions, 2d editions, with and without all the plates, with and without the dust jacket. The Philadelphia Print Shop was selling it for $325 on its website. On eBay, there were no takers for the book at auction prices of $95 to $299.99. Neither was anyone interested in 17 plates at $35.
Tearing apart a book makes me shiver. What a waste.
The “book lovers” fine talk is correct. But when covers and spines break down, books get soiled and stained, w/a few missing pages, book lovers turn up their noses. This stuff is on its way to the landfill, when someone rescues the only sellable savable part — the antique chromo plates in this case. Is it a great evil when someone brings these into the market???
Hi Stan, I think it is definitely a great evil to tear perfectly good pages from a book. If the book is in awful shape, yes, retrieve the plates. But I suspect that if the book is in rough condition, so are the plates. These plates are in good condition, and the book was likely in the same shape.