In the excitement last night, I was careless with a couple of names, also in later conversations. It was Guy Mountfort
not Philip Hollom that Roger Tory Peterson met on Hawk Mountain.
Bits from the book below. Advice of any errors will be welcome.
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Most popular bird books fall within the intermediate description ‘picture-based and informative’. With respect to these,
there has been a progression over time. After the expensive offerings of Gould and Audubon, different ways were found to illustrate bird books for a broader distribution. In the United Kingdom, Archibald Thorburn was commissioned to create most of the paintings
for Lord Lilford’s Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Isles (1885-1897). The same paintings were used for
The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs (T. A Coward, 1920). Although in two smallish volumes, with a third added in 1926, this was declared to be ‘a Handy Pocket Guide, in which each bird is represented by a coloured illustration to aid identification’.
The same paintings, reduced in size even further, appeared in 1936 in a condensed version of the three volumes edited by Enid Blyton under the title
Birds of the Wayside and Woodland.
In 1896 came a 4-volume
Handbook to the Birds of Great Britain, authored by R. Bowdler Sharpe of the British Museum and intended for popular use, but with a museum flavour. In the preface, he reviewed the ‘excellent books’ that had already been produced on the subject, referring
to the pending Lord Lilford work, and to ‘the popularity of Yarrell’s “History of British Birds” with its exquisite little woodcuts’. The illustrations in Sharpe’s book are chromolithographs, and not attributed , although stated to be ‘coloured from specimens
in the British Museum’ and inscribed with the name of the printer, Wyman and Sons, Limited.
The 5-volume
Handbook of British Birds (1938-1941) by H F Witherby and others carried plates mostly attributed to a Dutch landscape painter Marinus Adrianus Koekkoek the Younger, originally painted for a book on birds of the Netherlands. There were also paintings
by H. Gronvold, G. E. Lodge and Peter Scott. The plates were reproduced in reduced form in a one-volume
Popular Handbook of British Birds by Philip Hollom. The first edition came out just before the 1954 Peterson field guide that he co-authored.
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Stephen Moss explains the background to that 1954 European guide. It began as a chance encounter at, of all places
Hawk Mountain, Pennsylvania, when Peterson met Guy Mountfort. Over five years, the authors, including Philip Hollom, travelled around Europe to get field experience of more than 500 species. As Moss says, ‘A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe
was light years ahead of its rival’, The Pocket Guide to British Birds (1952), by Richard Fitter & Richard Richardson.
Mark Cocker tells the story more fully, starting with his view of Richard Richardson as ‘one of the most popular, the
most revered, the most remembered birders from the second half of the twentieth century, possibly from the whole century’. In the
Pocket Guide he ‘offered criteria for identifying birds which had never been considered as readily separable before’. He was ‘above all a sophisticated field observer’.
Trouble was, so too were Guy Mountfort and Philip Hollom and their American friend, the artist Roger
Tory Peterson … . Just two years after Richard’s plates appeared, the three of them produced the closest thing to a revolution in bird books, a work called
A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe. Richardson’s plates were good, but Peterson’s were better.
The bold, accurate colours and diagrammatic formula of the American artist’s birds completely eclipsed
the Englishman’s achievement. They captured exactly what the beginner birder needs to achieve an identification.
It was not until 1970 that there was something along the same lines for Australia, with the first Peter Slater guide.
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