The collected writings of John James Audubon. An artist, ornithologist, traveller, self-mythologiser, wilderness obsessive, and one of the great strange figures of American natural history.

Best known for The Birds of America, Audubon was not only a painter of birds but a restless recorder of landscape, weather, animals, travel, hunger, danger, solitude, vanity, encounter, and the so-called “New World.” Edited by Richard Rhodes, this anthology gathers from Audubon’s journals, letters, and published works, presenting him not simply as a naturalist but as a vivid, highly charged prose writer. His pages are full of birds, of course, but also boats, weather, wolves, ice, exhaustion, violence, awkward human meetings and much, much observation.

Audubon’s world is alive, gorgeous, brutal, acquisitive, and often ethically uncomfortable: beauty and possession tangled together, taxonomy with mud on its boots. It lets you read the wilderness imagination from inside its contradictions: wonder, appetite, science, conquest, attention, and art all flapping around in the same net.

Everyman’s Library hardback. Edited by Richard Rhodes. 2006. Ribbon marker. Lovely copy, in very good condition.