Selby, Prideaux John.

4 volumes (2 of text, 2 of plates), 8vo (220 x 138mm.), and folio (650 x 520mm.), plate volumes with engraved titles, 218  hand-coloured engraved plates, 4 plain anatomical plates, text bound in contemporary half morocco, plates in contemporary half calf, [Fine Bird Books, p.107; Nissen IVB 853; Zimmer, p.571], the text volumes with bookplates and inkstamps of the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, a few creases and occasional minor spotting, vol.1 plate 43 holed in margin, bindings rubbed, text volumes a bit worn

"'The most splendid and costly work yet published on the birds of Great Britain'" (William Swainson, quoted in Jackson). The work was issued irregularly, and consequently there is no consensus about what constitutes a first edition.

Prideaux John Selby (1788-1867) "was... gifted as an artist, and the two volumes of Illustrations of British Ornithology are outstandingly beautiful. In many people's estimation, the clarity and crispness of his figures gives them an austere beauty that is lacking in the pretty lithographs of H. L. Meyer's and John Gould's books... The cool, classical quality of Selby's plates belongs to the age of elegance and could have never been achieved by the Victorian John Gould. Selby's bird figures were the most accurate delineations of British birds to that date, and the liveliest. After so many books with small, stiff bird portraits, this new atlas with its life-size figures and more relaxed drawing was a great achievement in the long history of bird illustration" (Jackson).