Natural-Historia för Hemmet Och Skolan. Beskrifningar och Afbildningar af föremål utur Alla Naturens Riken. [Natural History for Home and School.]

Stockholm: P. A. Huldberg, 1853. First edition. Hardcover. Marbled paper on boards. . Very Good. Scarce juvenile natural history color plate book, with only copies known at National Library of Sweden and Princeton. Oblong, 22 by 35.5 cm. 34 hand-colored plates, followed by title page, 101 pages of text. The plates are loosely in the style of the Schreiber/Schubert "Naturgeschichte" published in Esslingen, but here they are hand-colored, as was done in earlier German juvenile zoological and botanical plate books, and some of the images have a more baroque sensibility to them, such as the plates depicting swans and storks or that depicting a peacock. We would also note that some of the animals shown are illustrated as they would have been in the eighteenth century, with details not necessarily fully true to life. Among the more exciting plates, in our view, are one showing ostriches as they are hunted down by native huntsmen on horseback, or a whale blowing out a jet of water as whalers with harpoons surround it, their ship in the distant background, or the plate depicting the multi-level salt mine. We would also single out as curious the first plate, an ethnographic depiction of Europeans, Mongolians, Africans, Native Americans and Aborigines. The hand-coloring in this volume is not always the most precise, but to our eye, it is generally as or more pleasing than chromolithography which was used later, and the superiority of the hand-coloring tells most in some of the individual specimen illustrations, as with fish, birds, and insects. Moderate wear. Age toning of the leaves.