DENTON, Sherman Foote As Nature Shows Them: Moths and butterflies of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, with over 400 photographic illustrations in the text and many transfers of species from life. Boston: Bradlee Whidden, 1900.
Large 8vo. 2 vols. Contemporary half red morocco with marbled boards, spines with gilt raised bands, lettering and butterfly centre tools, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt; pp. [xvi], 161, [1]; pp. [xvi], [163]-361, [1]; with [56] leaves of plates featuring real butterfly wings [10 in vol. I, 46 in vol. 2], over 400 photographic illustrations; edges of binding rubbed, corners bumped, occasional spotting, traces of cutting removed from verso of ffep of vol 2, very good.
First edition, number 23 of 500. Unsurprisingly, there was no second edition.
Sherman Foote Denton (1856-1937), lepidopterist and entrepreneur, was commissioned to produce hundreds of illustrations for the US Fish Commission (later the US Fish and Wildlife Service) and the Forest, Fish and Game Commission of New York State on the strength of his artistic prowess and skills as a collector. He also ran a business in Wellesley, Massachusetts selling butterfly collecting paraphernalia such as his own patented mount which preserved the subject on a piece of plaster rather than fixed on a pin.
This beautiful work, however, was produced as a labour of love in an effort to reproduce his subjects with utmost exactitude. No one before or since has attempted to illustrate a book with actual butterfly wings, for reasons that Denton himself outlines in his preface: "[the plates] are direct transfers from the insects themselves; that is to say, the scales of the wings of the insects are transferred to the paper while the bodies are printed from engravings and afterward colored by hand… I have had to make over fifty thousand of these transfers for the entire edition, not being able to get anyone to help who would do the work as I desired it done". In the light of this, it seems churlish to regard the 500 copies of this book as a "limited" edition. Moreover, each copy is slightly different due to the uniqueness of every individual butterfly's coloration.
Provenance: inkstamp of Richard I. Johnson to half-title of volume 1 and fly-leaf and half-title of volume 2. Johnson (1925-2020) was a long time Research Associate at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology who amassed one of the world's largest collection of shell books and published over fifty papers on malacology. He was remarkable for being an amateur, gentleman scholar with an international academic reputation.
Nineteenth Century American Color Plate Books, p. 107.
SKU: 2124910