For over a thousand bookworms, the past two years or so have been both a joy
and a problem. Seven more Collins New Naturalists, and fat ones at that;
more shuffling to find the necessary shelf space, but more excellent texts
in a wonderful series. September 2006 was a milestone in the history of the
series: Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands (reviewed in the TLS, January 12, 2007)
was the 100th NN volume; next was the late Derek Ratcliffe on Galloway and
the Borders; and then Stephan Buczacki’s Garden Natural History, Rosemary
Parslow’s The Isles of Scilly, Peter Bircham’s A History of Ornithology,
George Peterken’s Wye Valley and just recently, at No 106, Philip Corbet’s
and Stephen Brooks’s The Dragonflies. As the series has continued, it has
gained in stature. Of course, more than a thousand people buy each of these
volumes, but only that select few have them all and so have to rush out and
get each one. The series is an amazing achievement. Perhaps the greatest of
modern naturalists, Bill Hamilton, eulogized in the TLS (August 12, 1994)
about the NN series, by then up to about number eighty, pointing out that
they were “the first series in any country to use numerous colour plates
based on photography to sell natural history to the general public”. The
books are also a measure of natural history publication in the UK. It is now
difficult to appreciate how starved the public was of such material at the
end of the Second World War – and how hungry people were for new literature.
The early 1950s was a time of a rapidly growing interest in natural history,
stemming in part from the early natural history programmes on television
(James Fisher, who became known through some of this television work, was
one of the original editorial team for the NN series).
The NN series has always seemed to get it exactly right with what the public
wanted. Indeed, looking back from what is on sale today, it seems surprising
that some of the early volumes did so well. The very first, Butterflies, by
E. B. Ford, contained quite serious stuff, including sections on genetics
and evolution – more than one would expect today for a book that sold more
than 50,000 copies. Ford’s second contribution, Moths (number thirty in the
series), was even more demanding of the reader, yet it still sold 14,000
copies.
Over the sixty-odd years that the series has been going, knowledge has
expanded rapidly – so justifying new coverage of the same subject on a
number of occasions. For the most part, repeat subjects have come after a
long interval and have been written by new authors: Snowdonia, Broads,
Amphibians and Reptiles, Mammals, Moths, Seashore, Bumblebees, and the new
Dragonflies, plus some with different titles covering similar ground –
Mushrooms and Toadstools and Fungi; Birds and Men, Man and Birds; The Lake
District and Lakeland. Perhaps curiously, only two volumes have been
extensively revised in the series. If the books can in some ways be viewed
as a sort of social measure of the interest in natural history, they also
reflect the advances in knowledge that have occurred through the time. John
Free and Colin Butler’s Bumblebees (1959) ran to 189 pages, Ted Benton’s
(2006) to 542. Length alone is not a measure of quality, but Benton’s book
covers subjects that did not exist in 1959; it includes, for example, a
thirty-page chapter entitled “Bee Psychology” which discusses the ways in
which bees use pheromones – scents key to their knowledge of each other and
their foods. In the earlier volume, the word pheromone does not appear in
the index.
Several authors have contributed to more than one volume. Dudley Stamp and
Eric Simms tie with no fewer than four volumes each (Britain’s Structure and
Scenery, Man and the Land, The Common Lands of England and Wales and Nature
Conservation in Britain for Stamp; Woodland Birds, British Thrushes, British
Warblers and Larks, Pipits and Wagtails for Simms), with Sam Berry
(Inheritance and Natural History, Natural History of Shetland and Natural
History of Orkney) on three. Among those who wrote two, Sir Alistair Hardy’s
Open Sea volumes (subtitled The World of Plankton and Fish and Fisheries)
are unique in that they were planned from the outset to be written as two
volumes; a projected third, dealing with freshwaters and provisionally
titled “Ponds, Pools and Puddles” was never completed.
The books were always intended to be specifically for Britain. Indeed, a major
component of the series is its focus on regions – Snowdonia, Cairngorms,
Northumbria, Orkney, Shetlands and, more recently, The Gower, Galloway and
the Borders, The Isles of Scilly and Wye Valley. One of the early volumes, A
Country Parish (Great Budworth in Cheshire), has a bit of a ring of The
Natural History of Selborne about it; it was written by A. W. Boyd, a good
all-round naturalist who had spent much of his life in the parish. Depending
on the subject, other authors have strayed abroad, to include Europe, for
example – especially necessary for subjects such as birds that range more
widely; The Open Sea obviously looked beyond Britain’s shores. One real
outlier in the series is Insect Migration, a subject still poorly
understood. In 1958, when the volume was published, we knew particularly
little about it in the UK; this volume contains material from as far afield
as both Americas and Australia.
[4DROP]A[/4DROP] few volumes break the mould in other ways. Pedigree Words
from Nature is an etymological work – looking at the development of natural
history words in the English language from their origins to present usage. A
surprising number of everyday words can be traced back to some link with the
natural world – less surprisingly when one considers how much closer to the
soil our ancestors lived. We are familiar with the fact that many of our
places are derived from animals or plants, Brockenhurst or Okeover, for
example. But this book looks more at the origins of the names of the animals
and plants themselves. Many of these date back many centuries and often have
close equivalents in several European languages. This may be true even when
the name is based on a complete fallacy. The presence of nightjars hawking
for insects at dusk near to animal pens led the Greeks to think that the
birds used their large mouths to drink milk from the stock – hence the name
“goatsucker” which was used in several European languages and even in the
bird’s scientific name Caprimulgus. The most extraordinary volume must be
number eighty-three, The New Naturalists, in which Peter Marren traces the
history of the books themselves. This is a fascinating record of the series
and the editors, the artists and the photographers and how these have
responded to changing times. It is also a bibliophile’s paradise, giving all
kinds of details about each work including print runs and numbers sold for
each edition. Marren’s other contribution, Nature Conservation, also falls a
little outside the usual pattern of the subjects. In this, instead of
dealing with a group of organisms or an area, Marren looks at the state of
nature conservation in the country, the laws and the challenges facing
conservationists on an over-crowded island.
From the first, the volumes were noted for their colour photographs, though
these were early days for colour photography in books. Ford’s Butterflies
provided an excellent set of colour pictures of all the British butterflies.
The frontispiece of Ernest Neal’s The Badger (1948) was the first colour
photograph ever taken of a badger in the field. Not surprisingly, the
quality of some of those photographs is hardly of today’s standard. Another
change concerns the difficulty of getting photographs. Nowadays, an author
usually has access to a wide range of pictures; in many of the early works,
the editors commissioned photographers to take the photographs needed for
the book. Bill Hamilton paints a lovely scene of Collins packing four
photographers off in a small car to Wales, each with instructions to get
photographs for a different book. The quantity of colour work waxed and
waned with time. It started quite high, and decreased to zero in some (my
own British Tits, 1979, contains no colour at all). Now, with modern
printing methods, colour is in again. Also, its presentation differs from
the earlier volumes where it had to be on sheets of special paper. Nowadays
it can be incorporated throughout the text at will and, starting with number
ninety-six, Fungi, there are colour plates liberally spread throughout the
text; Rackham’s Woodlands has 172 plates, mostly colour photographs. For the
collector, the dust jackets have attracted a lot of interest; they were
designed by Clifford and Rosemary Ellis up until the seventieth volume
(Orkney), since when they have been designed by Robert Gillmor. Much work –
often including several re-drafts – went into these, and today a jacketless
volume is not considered collectable.
Yet despite their quality, and the fact that they are read by academics and
serious amateurs alike, their sales have long been on a downward slide. In
the 1950s, the books had the market almost to themselves. Gradually the
market expanded, and any natural history book today faces fierce
competition. Numbers published inevitably diminished, and the majority of
the latest thirty volumes have been paperbacks. This switch has had an
interesting social repercussion. For the collectors, paperbacks simply do
not count. As the numbers of hardback volumes have decreased, the collectors
have battled to get them. There were only 725 genuine first edition
hardbacks (more were bound up later) of The Natural History of Orkney and
British Warblers at a stroke, greatly limiting the number of complete sets
of first editions.
Scarcity drives prices. The New Naturalists Book Club, formed to keep
collectors abreast of developments, gives the dizzy prices to which some
volumes have soared. Sam Berry’s Orkney volume seems to have held the record
at £1,850 until some special leather-bound, celebratory copies of Rackham’s
100th hit eBay, where some reached at least £2,000. These prices are more
than somewhat ridiculous considering that the material can be easily
obtained in paperback. The values of certain other scarcer volumes have now
reached prices only a little less steep; some are advertised at several
hundred pounds. While this is perhaps some measure of people’s enthusiasm
for the series, Bill Hamilton would not have approved. He viewed the true
measure of a book’s worth in terms of how heavily thumbed it had been – “for
me the best in the series meant the dirtiest: most of mine had long ago lost
not only the dust-jackets, but also the gold-impressed titles on the spine”.
From time to time, Collins tried other formulae, including the Collins
Countryside series, but none ever really stood the test against the main New
Naturalist series. By far the most successful was the parallel series, the
New Naturalist Monographs. These were, as their title suggests, largely
books on single species – badger, redstart, hawfinch, mole, rabbit, trout,
etc – but this was not always so: Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos (1952) by Miriam
Rothschild and Teresa Clay covered a wide range of subjects relating to
parasitism, while Mumps, Measles and Mosaics (1954) by Kenneth Smith and Roy
Markham covered animal and plant viruses. Ants (1953), subsequently to be a
volume in the main series, had a number of errors in it, got panned by some
reviewers, and was rumoured to have been withdrawn, though it seems that
most of the print run was actually sold. In all, twenty-two Monographs were
published, ten of which were on birds; the last appeared in 1971.
Ernest Neal’s Badger (1948) sold the most (notching up 19,000 sales with
translations into German and Japanese) and played no small part in the
badger’s climb to popularity. Biologically, the most important of this
series (and arguably of the main series too) must surely be Niko Tinbergen’s
A Herring Gull’s World (1953), in which the Nobel Prize-winning author
brought together many of the behavioural observations that he made on the
developing chicks. Although only selling 12,500 copies as a NNM, it went on
to be printed in four foreign language editions and both hardback and
paperback editions for the US university ethology students. Some of these
now also command silly prices, the NN Book Club quoting four at £250 or
more. The Redstart (1956) by John Buxton perhaps deserves a special mention,
if only for the way in which the book came about. During the Second World
War, several people subsequently important in British ornithology and
ecology were prisoners of war in the same camp. Buxton studied the redstarts
and John Barrett the tree sparrows breeding in the camp grounds. At the end
of the war, both had to undertake arduous marches to freedom which
necessitated their leaving their few belongings, including all their notes,
to the vagaries of the post-war postal system. Buxton’s notes made it home
and formed the basis for his NNM; Barrett’s were lost – perhaps otherwise
there would have been a NNM on the tree sparrow as well. Both German and
Swiss ornithologists helped (the former at some risk to themselves) the
internees by providing literature, including Günther Niethammer’s
three-volume Handbuch der deutschen Vogelkunde (1942). One volume of this
was in Buxton’s parcel which made it home and is now in the Alexander
Library of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology in Oxford,
complete with the “Oflag VII B” library stamp.
I have a little story of my own to add to the history of the jackets. Just
before publishing my contribution, Collins commissioned the Ellises to
design the usual dust jacket. The design that they came up with was a rather
lurid yellow which I did not much like, but more importantly, neither did
the editors. The Ellises were asked to try again and they produced the
blue-green jacket that now graces the book. For a time, at least two of the
reject jackets remained in the Collins office; but when I tried to retrieve
them they were no longer to be found. How possession of those dust jackets
would have upset the other 999 collectors. Are they still there – somewhere?
Christopher Perrins is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.
His books include the Encyclopedia of Birds and Bird Migration, 2003.
