First of all, thanks to everyone who made last week’s Banned Books Week a success. If you weren’t at the Authors of Mischief reading, you might enjoy this post from the blogger at “A Quick Succession of Busy Nothings,” who was.
Now we are into Dracula season–check out this nice feature from WRTI on our Dracula material. In preparing the Dracula Festival postcards a few weeks ago one of our staff members asked me if we had any images of bats to use. When the topic is animals I always start by turning to Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, which if you’ve been on a house tour is the enormous run of red-bound encyclopedia volumes that lives on the north wall of the library.
George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon was the director of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and was preeminent naturalist of the eighteenth-century. In quintessentially Enlightenment fashion he wanted to create a book which encompassed all that was known about nature. He worked on it from 1749 until his death in 1788 and the project was continued posthumously. (As an aside, in volume five he brought up his theory of American Degeneracy, which led to a challenge from Thomas Jefferson, which you can read about on these great pages from the Academy of Natural Science) Anyway, I pulled one of Buffon’s volumes of quadrupeds off the shelf and lo and behold, there was picture after picture of bats.
Bats with enormous ears, posed against scenic mountain backdrops….jpg)
One of the neat things about our copy of Histoire Naturelle, is that it contains multiple state of the same plate–here’s another version of the same bats….jpg)
Here are some bats with funny noses, hanging around in caves, although that block of stone in the lower right background seems awfully squared off…
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…which may be connected to the penchant for showing animals against picturesque ruins, like this bat here.
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These are only some of the great bat pictures brought to us courtesy of Buffon, but you’ll have to make a reading room appointment to scope out the rest and go batty yourself!