Making of The Naturalist’s Library - C82: Works of Nicholas Rougeux

Making of The Naturalist’s Library

By Nicholas Rougeux, posted on July 7, 2026 in

A big project is something special. The excitement of the unknown, watching it evolve, and trying new ideas are things I look forward to in every project. Recreating The Naturalist’s Library was no different and presented unique challenges, from an overabundance of source material to creating my first book.

Background and source material

William Jardine’s Library, was a series of books created to bring the natural world into the homes of the Victorian middle class. It was originally published in 40 volumes in Edinburgh, Scotland by his brother-in-law, W. H. Lizars, between 1833 and 1843 and later divided into four main sections: Ornithology (14 volumes), Mammalia (13 volumes), Entomology (7 volumes), and Ichthyology (6 volumes). Each volume contained 30–37 plates of illustrations depicting wildlife paired with detailed descriptions as well as a memoir of a leading naturalist.

The Library is credited with having a significant democratizing effect on the study of natural history because Jardine and Lizars prioritized affordability and portability. Each book was only 4 by 6 inches and priced at six shillings, making them a much more accessible alternative to the “unwieldy folios” from other naturalists. This led to a tremendous demand for each one, resulting in tens of thousands of copies being printed overall. Just two years into publication, a notice appears at the beginning of one volume stating, “we have sold upwards of 60,000 volumes, in which there have been nearly 2,400,000 coloured plates given as Illustration.” Exact sales numbers are difficult to come by but history has shown that the series was very popular with estimates of 10,000 copies sold for each volume, totaling at least 400,000.

Collage of spreads from each volume

Photo of all 40 volumes held at the Newberry Library in Chicago

The large collection of wildlife plates is the centerpiece of the entire series. Traditionally, copper was used to print fine illustrations but typically wore out after several thousand printings, so to achieve the volume needed, Lizars used engraved steel plates which didn’t wear down as quickly. The illustrations were printed in intaglio where after the etchings were made, ink was spread over them and wiped off so only the ink inside the etchings remained for printing. The colors were added afterward by hand, mostly by women because they were seen at the time as more cost-effective. Despite my best efforts in emailing institutions around Scotland and England, I could not track down any surviving steel plates as they were likely melted down for other uses. Please contact me if any still exist.

Brief video showing an examples of the intaglio process.

The vast majority of plates follow the same style with a central colored figure surrounded by an ornate landscape of their natural environment. This design kept costs down by limiting colors to a central figure and allowed it to stand out from its surrounding environment. A handful of illustrations didn’t include a landscape and the entire volume on beetles didn’t include any. Below each figure was the English or scientific name of the species. The detail is a treat to examine. In total, there were 1,347 plates of wildlife published across 40 volumes, including the redesign of one set of plates for the volume on monkeys published in a later edition (see below).

Scans of plates from the volumes on ruminantia, sun-birds, British butterflies, and economical uses of fish

Each volume was structured in the same manner, beginning with a memoir of a well known naturalist followed by an introduction to the volume’s topic and then descriptions of wildlife interleaved with plates. Two volumes included an extra memoir at the end and in a few later editions, the plates were collected at the end of some volumes.

All pages of the first humming-birds volume

a portrait of naturalist featured in the memoir

the title page with a vignette of one or more animals or scene related to them

table of contents

memoir of the naturalist

introduction to the volume’s topic

descriptions of wildlife interleaved with plates

Determining the “correct” order in which these volumes were published was my first real puzzle because my research turned up several conflicting lists. Most grouped them by the four main divisions—ornithology, mammalia, entomology, and ichthyology (in that order) like the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Doull Books, Finarte, Swann Auction Galleries, and Biblio. However Jardine’s Wikipedia page lists them without divisions in a different order and with publishing years beyond the initial 10-year run (1833–1843). I naïvely assumed the later years were just reprints and that the division grouping was the...