All the World's Birds: Buffon's Illustrated Natural History, General and Particular, of Birds (Fourth Edition, First Printing)

LECLERC, Georges-Louis, Comte de Buffon (illus. François-Nicolas Martinet; sel. & intro. Stéphane Schmitt with Cédric Crémière; foreword David Sibley). All the World's Birds: Buffon's Illustrated Natural History, General and Particular, of Birds. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2011.

Large Folio (390 × 310 mm). Green cloth hardcover. Spine lettered in gilt. Pictorial dust wrapper and matching illustrated green cloth slipcase. 670 pp. 1,008 full-colour reproductions of birds throughout, after the original hand-coloured engravings by François-Nicolas Martinet. Fourth edition, first printing. 

Before Audubon, there was Buffon. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) was one of the dominant intellectual figures of the French Enlightenment; a mathematician, cosmologist, encyclopaedist, and the foremost naturalist of his century. His Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, published in thirty-six volumes between 1749 and his death in 1788, was the most ambitious attempt yet made to document the whole of the natural world: its geography, its geology, its animals, its plants, its fossils. The ornithological volumes, covering some 1,000 species of birds in texts of extraordinary richness constituted a resource without parallel in the science of the period, and they shaped the development of ornithology for generations of naturalists who followed, including notably Charles Darwin.

Between 1765 and 1783, François-Nicolas Martinet separately produced illustrations for the species captured within de Buffon's works and published them as the Planches enluminées. Martinet's plates and Buffon's text were published independently throughout the eighteenth century and had never been brought together in a single volume until this Rizzoli publication, which marks the first publication of Buffon's writings in one volume with Martinet's beautiful yet scientifically precise engravings.

This volume presents 1,008 colour reproductions covering species from every continent. Species ranging from the familiar to the extraordinary are reproduced here at generous scale and with meticulous attention to detail and colour. The selections from Buffon's text have been made and introduced by Stéphane Schmitt, a researcher at France's National Research Center who specialises in the history of natural history, with Cédric Crémière, director of Le Havre's Natural History Museum. The foreword is by David Sibley, one of the world's leading ornithologists and the author of Sibley's Guide to Birds.

Near fine. A few minor spots to front flyleaf; some mild shelf wear to slipcase covers and dust jacket spine. Otherwise fine throughout: bright, clear, presenting almost as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000625