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America's Other Audubon
Joy Kiser
Princeton Architectural Press
May 2012
On Sale: May 2, 2012
192 pages
ISBN: 1616890592
EAN: 9781616890599
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
America's Other Audubon chronicles the story of Genevieve
Jones, her family, and the making of an extraordinary
nineteenth-century book, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs
of Birds of Ohio. At the age of twenty-nine, Genevieve
Jones, an amateur naturalist/artist and daughter of a
country doctor, visited the 1876 Centennial World's Fair in
Philadelphia, where she saw Audubon's paintings in Birds of
America on display. His artwork inspired her to undertake
the production of a book illustrating the birds nests and
eggs that Audubon neglected to include in his work. Her parents were reluctant to support the undertaking of
such an ambitious and expensive project until Genevieve
became despondent over a broken engagement. Concerned over
her fragile mental state, they encouraged her to begin the
book as a distraction. Her brother collected the nests and
eggs, her father paid for the publishing costs, and
Genevieve and her girlhood friend learned lithography and
began illustrating the specimens. The book was sold by
subscription in twenty-three parts. When part one of
Genevieve's work was issued, leading ornithologists praised
the illustrations, and Rutherford B. Hayes and Theodore
Roosevelt added their names to the subscription list. One
reviewer wrote: It is one of the most beautiful and
desirable works that has ever appeared in the United States
upon any branch of natural history and ranks with Audubon's
celebrated work on birds. Then, suddenly, Genevieve died of typhoid fever after
personally completing only five of the illustrations. Her
family took up the completion of the work in her memory.
They labored for seven years until the book was completed in
1886; collecting nests and eggs, drawing lithographs on
stone, and hand coloring fifty copies of each illustration,
and writing the field notes for each species of bird. Both
the brother who collected the nests and eggs and wrote the
field notes, and the mother who completed the drawings on
stone and hand coloring, were stricken with typhoid fever
two years after Genevieve's death and nearly died. In spite of serious damage to their health, they never gave
up and labored until the book was finished. The father
covered the publishing costs, which were higher than had
been anticipated and were not covered by the subscription
price, and ultimately lost his entire retirement savings
completing the task in his daughter's memory. The mother
lost her eyesight at the end of her life from the effects of
typhoid fever and long hours of straining to draw and color
the nests and eggs. But neither parent ever complained and
considered their work on the book the most important
accomplishment of their lives. When the mother's copy of the
volume was exhibited on the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, it
was awarded a bronze medal. Only 90 copies of the book were
produced and fewer than 20 have been located today in
libraries or in private collections. America's Other Audubon includes a foreword by the Curator
of Natural-History Rare Books at the Smithsonian, Leslie
Overstreet, a prologue and introduction by researcher and
writer Joy M. Kiser (with archival photographs of the family
and original advertisements and ephemera from the
publication and sale of the book), the 68 original color
plates of nests and eggs, plus selected field notes, a key
to the eggs, and a key to the birds scientific and current
common names (which have changed since the book first
published in the nineteenth century). Joy Kiser has been
friends with the Jones ancestors for fourteen years and has
access to family photographs and documents that the general
public has never seen. The Joneses story has never been
fully told and no other author is better prepared to tell it.
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