Audubon's Elephant : The Story Of John Audubon's Epic Struggle To Publish The Bird Of America

Description

The unlikely story of how the most famous work on birds came into being.

Illegitimate, half-French, half-American, poorly educated, chronically short of money and obsessed with birds, Audubon came to England in 1826 to find a publisher for his extraordinary paintings. He insisted that they must be reproduced on double-elephant folio paper - sheets almost 40 inches by 30 - so that even the largest species could be represented life size, and no-one in America had been prepared to tackle such a gigantic task. Drawing on Audubon's journals, letters to his wife and the archives of the families with whom he stayed and worked, Duff Hart-Davis recreates Audubon's twelve years in Britain in search of patrons and publishers. It is an extraordinary story of an obsessive genius and his observations of people, places and events in early nineteenth-century England and Scotland.