The Rhinoceros: A Monograph (Special Limited Edition)

NARDELLI, Francesco (illus. Matthew Hillier; text compiled Sandra Raphael; foreword John Aspinall; maps John Woodcock). The Rhinoceros: A Monograph. London: The Basilisk Press, 1988.

Elephant Folio (67 × 49.5 cm). Full brown leather. Cover titling in blind. Bound by Smith Settle, Otley. 134 pp. 20 full-colour tipped-in plates by Matthew Hillier throughout, with 4 plates for each of the five species. Numerous behavioural vignettes and sketches. Maps by John Woodcock. Text printed on 175gsm paper; plates printed on Mohawk Super Fine paper using a new waterless printing technique. First edition. Special Edition, limited to 60 copies, this being number 34. Signed by Francesco Nardelli and Matthew Hillier on the limitation page. Includes an original pencil illustration by Matthew Hillier, presented in a lime green frame.

The Basilisk Press was established with a purpose that its own foreword writer described with characteristic directness. John Aspinall (the conservationist, zoo owner, and founder of Howletts and Port Lympne wildlife parks) wrote of the project: "The production of this book is a bold venture inspired by love and admiration, rather than commercial logic or academic zeal." The description applies equally to the Basilisk Press as an enterprise and to the specific monograph it produced.

The five living species of rhinoceros are among the most endangered large mammals on earth. At the time of this monograph's production in 1988, all five were under severe threat; the Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses had already been reduced to tiny remnant populations. The book is dedicated by Nardelli to Torgamba, a Sumatran rhinoceros bull, "in the sincere hope that he will not prove to be the last of his kind." The hope has proved, in the decades since, to be prescient in its anxiety: the Sumatran rhinoceros now numbers fewer than fifty individuals in the wild, the Javan rhinoceros fewer than seventy, and the Northern White Rhinoceros has been functionally extinct since the death of its last male in 2018.

Matthew Hillier spent two years illustrating the monograph, travelling to Africa and Sumatra to study rhinoceroses in the field, producing twenty large plates of portraits and paintings of the five species, together with behavioural sketches. The resulting paintings are stunning works: each species represented by four full-colour tipped-in plates printed on Mohawk Super Fine paper using a waterless printing technique that was, at the time, among the most technically advanced available for fine press production.

The text was compiled by Sandra Raphael, and the five chapters combine scientific description, natural history, and conservation context with a sustained argument for the urgency of preservation. The maps by John Woodcock document the historical and contemporary ranges of each species with the same precision brought to the paintings.

The Special Edition of 60 copies is distinguished from the standard signed limited edition of 300 copies in cloth by its full leather binding executed by Smith Settle of Otley, West Yorkshire, one of the foremost fine binderies in England, and by the inclusion of an original pencil illustration by Matthew Hillier, presented here in a lime green frame — a unique work of art associated with the production, different in each copy, and a direct outcome of the two years Hillier spent studying and drawing rhinoceroses in the field.

Fine. A pristine copy throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000618