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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector
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Jonathan Dwight, Marcia Brady Tucker Collection, Smithsonian Institution Libraries By 1800 relatively few North American birds had been named and described.
The major task of ornithology in the nineteenth century, therefore, was to
provide a comprehensive species list of North American birds with
sufficient description to allow identification. More detailed description
then supported studies of taxonomic relationships and within-species
variation, including geographical variation, sexual dimorphism,
age-related change, and variation related to the molt cycle. This work
required numerous specimens, which were collected with the gun and
deposited in museums for study. New Yorker Jonathan Dwight belonged to
this essential descriptive phase of North American ornithology. In the
days before professionalization and specialization, when gifted amateurs
could make valuable contributions to the natural sciences, Dwight
collected more than sixty thousand North American bird skins, eventually
depositing the collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York for study by his fellow ornithologists. Dwight was
born in 1858, graduated from Harvard in 1880, and received his medical
degree at Columbia University in 1893. Although trained as a physician, he
practiced medicine for only fifteen years before turning fulltime to the
study of birds, an interest that began when he was fourteen. During his
undergraduate days, he would rise as early as 3 a.m. to climb trees so he
could collect eggs and nests, holding the eggs in his mouth to free his
arms for the descent. His diary entry for 11 May 1878 recorded that
"my mouth has not accommodation for 5 Crow Blackbird’s eggs as
proved by my tooth (not the only one I have) going through one, while
descending a spruce tree by moonlight." In 1877 Dwight began keeping systematic notes about his sightings and
about the birds he collected. Hunting trips with his father and training
in rifle shooting while a member of the New York National Guard prepared
him well for the task of collecting, and his training as a surgeon
developed his ability to prepare the bird skins for study. The skills of
collecting, minute observation, and detailed description combined to
produce one of the most important of Dwight's numerous published articles,
“The Sequence of Plumages and Molts of the Passerine Birds of New
York" (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 13 [1900]:
73-360), based on painstaking counts and microscopic examination of
feathers and feather tracts. A later work, Gulls of the World, published
as a Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in
1925, brought him recognition as an expert on the Laridae. As a member of the American Ornithologists' Union from its inception in
1883, Dwight participated in the development of ornithology as a
profession. He served as treasurer from 1903 until 1920, then as
vice-president until 1923, when he was elected president for a three-year
term. The American Museum of Natural History provided Dwight a room for
his growing collection of North American birds in 1909, and there he
amassed, labeled, and cataloged more than sixty thousand skins before his
death twenty years later. His interest in classification and nomenclature
led to his diligent acquisition of bird books to help him identify species
and subspecies. Because
descriptive ornithology was a scholarly field in which an enormous
accumulation of facts was gathered and worked into a coherent description
of the taxonomy, structure, and distribution of North American birds, its
practitioners depended on a large and scattered literature in which many
old sources continued to be of major significance. At a time when there
were few large public collections of books, naturalists formed working
Collections of their own and exchanged needed publications among
themselves. Since “Americana” had not become collectible in his day,
Dwight was able to purchase many early American imprints. He also
accumulated an important collection of local bird lists. But Dwight's
bibliophilic enthusiasm appears to have gone beyond his immediate needs
for scientific work, entering the realm of book collecting per se. He
is listed as a collector of North American ornithology in Private Book
Collectors in the United States and Canada with Mention of Their
Hobbies (comp. John Allan Holden [New York: Bowker, 1925]); he is also
in the 1919 edition. Many of
today's great ornithological collections have as their nuclei private
collections, such as the Coe collection at Yale, the Ellis collection at
the University of Kansas, the Ayer collection at the Field Museum in
Chicago, the Thayer collection at Harvard, the Blacker and Wood
collections at McGill, and the Elliot collection at the American Museum of
Natural History. Dwight's library followed that tradition. Soon after
Dwight's death in 1929, New York socialite and amateur ornithologist
Marcia Brady Tucker, the wealthy daughter of one of the founders of
Consolidated Edison and Union Carbide and a two-term director of the
National Association of Audubon Societies, acquired the collection. Her
private librarian, Madeleine Curtis, worked in the early 1930s to acquire
additional titles; she also may have weeded titles that Tucker already
owned, since some volumes with Dwight bookplates have become available on
the antiquarian market over the years. Upon Tucker's death in 1976, the
collection, numbering almost five hundred titles, went to the Smithsonian
Institution Libraries as a gift. Among the books featuring Dwight
bookplates in the Smithsonian's Tucker collection are The Naturalist's
Library: Containing Scientific and Popular Descriptions of Man, Quadrupeds,
Birds, Fishes, Reptiles and Insects (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and
Company, 1854) and Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky
Mountains (Ithaca: The Author, 1838). The bookplate reproduced on the
cover is from The Land-birds and Game-birds of New England by H. D.
Minot (Salem: The Naturalists' Agency, 1877), in the possession of
Frederic F. Burchsted. That book includes the inscription ''from Aunt
Baker, Christmas 1877.'' Dwight's bookplate, measuring
approximately 2 3/4 inches long by 3 3/4 inches, clearly represents the
ethos of the era during which he pursued ornithology. The graphic elements
include a rifle and a quill pen, alluding to the primacy of collection and
description. The open book pictured on the bookplate reads, "A bird
in the hand is worth two in the bush," which, together with the
number of birds depicted, echoes the eagerness for specimens
characteristic of a time when ornithologists were preeminently collectors.
Although the engraver of Dwight's appealing bookplate is identified by the
initials "G. G. D." in tiny type on the plate itself, it seems
likely that Dwight himself directed the use of that imagery. Once the
North American bird fauna was thoroughly described taxonomically and
morphologically, a new generation of ornithologists turned to detailed
observation and analysis of behavior and ecology. This change was aided by
the establishment of reliable methods of sight identification during the
1920s and 1930s, utilizing improvements in binocular design. In contrast
to Dwight's imagery, an ornithologist's bookplate from the later era was
likely to depict a single, clearly living bird and perhaps a pair of
binoculars. Upon Dwight's death in 1929, the AOU's quarterly publication printed an
obituary that said, in part, "He endeared himself to all with whom he
came in contact and most ornithologists who have visited New York during
the past thirty years have delightful recollections of the hospitality of
his home and the pleasure of consulting with him his unrivalled library of
American Ornithology." That collection, now named for the woman who
made it available to the public, remains an impressive representation of
the state of the art of descriptive ornithology in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Frederic F. Burchsted Cheryl
Knott Malone University of Texas at Austin
[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 27, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 78-81.]
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| Last updated June 30, 2001 |
