Icones Avium Dev Diary #1: Background

Elizabeth and John Gould published a vast oeuvre of natural history books in the nineteenth century. Their work had a profound and long-lasting impact on natural history documentation.

John Gould was an esteemed 19th century ornithologist, who became famous for his natural history works recording birds from around the globe. These works were beautifully illustrated with hand-coloured lithographs, many by his wife Elizabeth Gould (née Coxen).

The Goulds had great success with early works such as A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, The Birds of Europe and A Family of Toucans. Icones Avium was their seventh major publication, originally intended as an ongoing General History of Birds. However, only two parts were issued.

The full title is “Icones avium, or, Figures and descriptions of new and interesting species of birds from various parts of the globe.” It details 18 birds from around the world with hand-coloured lithographs all by Elizabeth. The two parts were printed in imperial folio size: 15″ x 22″.

My initial intent had been to make a digital edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America. However, with 435 plates at double elephant size (26½″ x 40″), this was a daunting prospect that would take far too long. Instead I trawled through the Biodiversity Heritage Library to find a much smaller publication to work on.

After viewing many more of the Gould’s works, and yet more from other naturalists of the day, I settled on Icones Avium: 18 plates with associated text in English and Latin provides just the right amount of content to establish a prototype and workflow. It’s manageable.

My intent then is to convert this work into a restored, searchable digital edition, using suitable open-source technologies. I’ll share my content structure considerations, design explorations, and general process. And I’ll share the code in a public Github repo when it’s done.

I have very limited spare time, so I’m giving myself a generous soft target of two months which takes me to the middle of July. I think is doable, but I’m always over optimistic and life tends to get in the way of personal projects.

Why not follow along as I experiment my way through converting this beautiful public domain work into a shiny new digital version. Follow me on Bluesky.