A Monograph of the Pittidae, or, Family of Ant Thrushes by D.G. Elliot (1st Edition)

Author: Elliot, D.G. 
Title: A Monograph of the Pittidae, or, Family of Ant Thrushes 
Publisher: D. Appleton & Company 
Date: 1863 
Place: New York 
Dimensions:  Folio. 55.5cm x 36cm 

102pp. Originally published in 6 parts (1861-63), this is the first edition, with the 1863 title page.
Some species with individual pagination, others with continuous pagination.
31 unnumbered leaves of hand coloured plates.

Half green leather over marbled boards, marbled pattern repeated on endpapers. 5 Raised bands, gilt tooling and titles to spine compartments. Leather borders double gilt ruled. Boards a trifle scuffed. Leather corners and lower board leather adjacent to the spine peeled and scuffed, with previous, sympathetic retouching visible. All edges gilt. Contemporary pencil bookseller's information to verso of rear free endpaper.

Daniel Giraud Elliot was an American zoologist and founder of the American Ornithologist Union.  In his preface, Elliot notes that he had painstakingly instructed the illustrator P. Oudart in executing the plates, but after producing only 3 could not continue the work. Unwilling to repeat this lengthy process and feeling that there was no-one better qualified, he decided to "turn draftsman" and execute the remainder himself.  Species are drawn in their natural habitat, with exceedingly fine drawings of native flowers in each scene. Superbly coloured in rich, deep pigments, raised with gum Arabic to accentuate the tones. The work was reprinted in 1897 and a second, revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1893-95.

Sparse fingermarks, a handful of spots to the negative space of the plates, a touch of occasional offsetting, both of the text to opposite blank pages and of the illustrations to tissue guards. Some acidic bleed-through to blank verso of the plate B. mulleri. Pp91 (text) foxed. Plate B. maximus has some feint white (paper?) residue to the black plumage, where the ink has likely removed some threads of paper laid atop it before fully drying – scarcely noticeable. Wing of B. celebensis with what appears to be very light pigment imperfection.

Other than these minor faults a near fine, bright, clean and most attractive copy of this exceedingly scarce volume, noted by Sabine to have had a print run of only 200 copies.

From the library of South African natural history book dealer, publisher and conservationist Russel Friedman.

Sabine (B. 22228) and Sitwell (pp95) erroneously call for 32 coloured plates.
Wood (pp332) lists a later edition as the second with 51 plates.  
Not in Anker. 
Zimmer (pp206) lists a true second edition with 31 plates.