

Sanders made an early and important contribution to raising Audubon’s profile as a writer by editing Audubon Reader, a 1986 anthology of his best prose. But Audubon was also a writer, and a remarkable one.” Say his name, and in the minds of most listeners a colored print will arise. “Reproductions of his vivid birds and beasts hang in our courthouses, lie in slick books on our coffee tables, decorate our bedrooms and greeting cards. “We are all familiar with Audubon the painter,” Sanders writes. Scott Russell Sanders, one of America’s most accomplished living nature writers, counts Audubon’s prose as a critical source of inspiration.

In recent years, though, a small but dedicated community of Audubon admirers has been trying to give Audubon the writer his due. His art gained enduring international fame, while his substantial body of nature writing, detoured into other venues, endures in relative obscurity. But that first separation between Audubon’s pictures and his words has shaped his legacy for generations. Over time, Audubon’s vivid prose reflections would surface in other books, such as his lively, multivolume Ornithological Biography, published between 18.

To avoid the British copyright requirement, he published Birds of America essentially without text, leaving his written bird profiles and ornithological anecdotes for other publishing projects. The prospect of producing so many library copies of his book was overwhelming, since the high production values of Birds of America gave each edition a whopping price tag of about $1,000 or roughly $23,000 in today’s money.įaced with economic reality, Audubon devised a resourceful loophole. British copyright law stipulated that copies of all books containing text be deposited in crown libraries around the country, and the expense of that requirement would have fallen on Audubon. First published in England, where he had gone to find the best printer available, Audubon’s massive collection of 435 bird illustrations confronted a curious legal provision when it first appeared between 18.
