Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon's The Birds of America

Central to Nobles’s discussion will be John James Audubon’s double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America (4 vols., 1827-38), a work that still stands as one of the most remarkable artistic and scientific achievements in the history of the book. It is a massive work of natural history that offers the reader an innovative interplay between image and text. For Audubon, though, producing this “Great Work” proved to be as much about enterprise as ornithology, and The Birds of America became the family business for more than three decades. Nobles will consider the popular perception of Audubon’s birds from his time to our own, exploring the connection between the cultural and commercial significance of this big book about birds that represents both an investigation of nature and an investment in art. The various ways people have valued Audubon’s work leads to the question of whether The Birds of America is—or should be—a book at all.