Biggest: It takes at least four staff members to turn the page of the “Double Elephant Folio” edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. Each of the four volumes in the set weighs between 50-60 pounds, and each page measures nearly 40” high by 30” wide. The “Double Elephant Folio” designation refers to the size of the paper used by Audubon to display his life-size bird engravings. The Museum’s copy is one of only 110 complete bound sets in the world.To change the page on display, two staff members are needed to lift and hold open the glass cover on the display case, and two additional staff members then carefully turn the fragile pages to the desired plate. Because of the heft of the individual volumes, it takes two people to lift a volume out of the case in order to exchange it with one of the other volumes for display. You can see pictures of staff members turning the page in a blog post from April 2010.
John Sherwin, Jr., donated the Museum’s copy of Audubon’s masterpiece in 1947 in memory of his father. The original owner of the set was the Rev. Patrick Bronte of Falmouth, England, the father of the Bronte sisters. The giant Birds of America is also the heaviest book in the Rare Book Collection!
Smallest: So small that it has to be stored in an
envelope on the shelf, Donald K. Yeomans’ 1985 book, Comet Halley: Facts and Folly, is only 2 ½” tall, not even 2” wide, and barely ½ an inch thick. This tiny “artist book” was hand printed, colored, and bound, and is part of a limited edition of 350 copies printed at the Ampersand Workshop (ours is Copy F). It was a gift of Paul L. Csank in 1988.Oldest: At well over 300-years-old, The Gentleman’s Recreation (Hunting, Fowling, Hawking, and Fishing), by Nicholas Cox, is the oldest book in the Museum’s collection. Published in 1697, this book was useful in its day for providing instructions for hunting and fishing. Mrs. Benjamin P. Bole donated this rare book to the Museum in 1946.
Photo by Sue White, October 2011
Most Amazing Disguise: Inside the rather ordinary-looking two-volume set of Alexander Smith’s Mushrooms in Their Natural Habitats is a wonderful surprise: one volume contains the text, and the other,
disguised as a book, holds stereoscopic slides with 
photos of mushroom specimens, and a Viewmaster for viewing the illustrations. The photographs are credited to William S. Gruber, the inventor of the Viewmaster, an invention which was introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair, just ten years before this unique treasure was published. The Museum owes a big thanks to Miss Florence T. Waite, who donated this set to the Library in 1969.Most Amazing Act of Camouflage: Thomas Bewick’s A General History of Quadrupeds was originally published in 1790. The Museum’s copy of the 5th edition appears to be an unremarkable book: it is not the biggest, or the smallest, book in the collection; it’s not extremely old, and the illustrations are black-&-white woodcuts. What makes this book so unique is a watercolor painting hidden under the gold-decorated edge of the book. This “fore-edge painting” can only be seen when the pages of the book are carefully fanned. Sadly, the painter of this hidden watercolor has never been identified, but the Museum is extremely lucky to have such an amazing book in its Rare Book Collection.
All photos by Layne Fargo, 2009, unless noted otherwise.