Science Saturday
This past #Feathursday we featured a page spread from the 6th edition of the Systema Naturæ of Carl Linnaeus, published in Stockholm in 1748. The English poet and Cambridge University scholar Thomas Gray (1716-1771) was also a great fan of the Swedish taxonomist, and produced an extra-illustrated copy of the important 10th edition of Systema Naturæ, published in Stockholm in 1758, with Gray’s own drawings and extensive notes. This 3-volume set (the original edition was in two volumes, but with Gray’s many additions, it had to be rebound in three) was eventually acquired by the Harvard scholar and art historian Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908).
Today we present a few facsimiles of Gray’s illustrations from Norton’s The Poet Gray as a Naturalist, printed in 1903 by Daniel Berkeley Updike in a limited edition of 500 copies on handmade paper at The Merrymount Press for the Boston bookseller Charles E. Goodspeed. Norton’s edition features an introductory essay and thirteen photogravure reproductions of a few of Gray’s notes and sketches. Today we show Gray’s illustrations and notes from the Insecta portion of Systema Naturæ. Our copy of The Poet Gray as a Naturalist is another gift of our friend and benefactor Jerry Buff and also bears the bookplate of the noted book collector Brian Douglas Stilwell.
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