Word: audubons
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Down the Ohio River floated a skiff manned by two Negroes, carrying a young couple and their baby to a new home farther west. The long-haired young man, whose weathered face belied his trade, was a storekeeper with a passion for painting birds. His name was John James Audubon. Passing an island, Audubon saw the cross-eyed, hook-nosed face of a horned owl. Up came his fowling piece; he shot, leaped overboard to retrieve the bird. As he waded through the shallows he began sinking in quicksand. The Negroes, cautioning him not to move, braced themselves with oars...
...went on, through hazards of flood, hurricane, earthquake, blizzard, to find another horned owl, 1,000 more birds. All of them he painted patiently, carefully, some of them over & over, until he had 1,065 water colors with which he was satisfied. While Audubon looked for an English publisher for his work, he had considerable trouble proving his point that the birds should be reproduced, as he had painted them, life size. "If large," one publisher wrote of the projected book, "only public institutions and a few noblemen will purchase it. If small, it may sell a thousand copies...
...week the prediction was expanded to exploding point when 50,000 copies of the first "public" edition* were released. The new book consists of the plates from the two earlier editions and explanatory notes by William Vogt, editor of Bird Lore, the official publication of the National Association of Audubon Societies...
...Audubon, hypercritical of his own work, would never have passed the present pictures, which have suffered from the reduction in size and difference in the method of reproduction. The "elephant" folio was exquisitely engraved on copper and aquatinted (principally by Robert Havell, who edited as he transcribed Audubon's watercolors, here deleting a leaf-spray, there toning down a garish sunset sky, altogether contributing much artistic merit to the pictures). Plates for the new edition have been reduced and reproduced by mechanical, sometimes fuzzy lithography. Nevertheless, the pictures' cumulative effect makes the book exciting. The wild turkey, giant...
...National Association of Audubon Societies has established another hawk sanctuary at Cape May, N. J. All hawks, save the bird-eating sharp-shinned, Cooper's and goshawk, are rather beneficial than harmful and are protected in 15 States...