Photography by John Livzey & Matt Gainer MFA ’97
Snow Buntings
John James Audubon
The Birds of America (1827-1838)

Issue: Autumn 2003

The Birds & the Bees & the Flowers & the Trees

For 60 years, Doheny Library has been home to a treasure trove of rare volumes on natural history.

To visit the Hancock Natural History Collection is to step into the land of the giants: giants who founded the biological sciences, the giant who acquired their works, and the gigantic volumes themselves, for which the term “book” seems laughably light.

Dwarf Lilly Pierre Joseph Redoute, Les liliacees (1802-1816)

It’s one of the finest natural history collections in the country, with a first edition of John James Audubon’s Birds of America and many other priceless works. Amassed over more than a century by the Boston Society of Natural History, and brought to USC in 1944 by the legendary Capt. G. Allan Hancock, the collection of nearly 80,000 volumes represents a precious resource for students and researchers, from zoologists to marine biologists. The Hancock collection is also – on the simplest level – a bunch of books. And that, one might think, is its least interesting aspect.

Readers reared on paperbacks and e-zines are in for a revelation when they visit the collection: there are books, and there are books.

For someone who has never handled a centuries-old illustrated work, the experience of touching and lifting the object can be surprisingly powerful. Many books in the collection are massive, hanging over the sides of the cart and needing two people to be lifted securely. Their leather covers are as thick as a finger, their pages hand-rolled and woven dense with linen and cotton. After 400 years or more for some of the books, the paper is whiter and crisper than that of a 10-year-old softback.

Strombus Gallus William Swainson Exotic conchology (1841) Swainson gave up a career in the British army in 1815 to pursue his primary interest, natural history. He left for Brazil on an expedition to collect plants and animals. As this work on shells demonstrates, he was a talented illustrator as well. Exotic conchology is one of the collection’s many works on shells, a favorite collecting subject in the 19th century.

Visitors frequently ask to see the biggest work of all: the Audubon, the first and most celebrated encyclopedia of American birds. Its size is such that the edition is referred to, technically, as a “double elephant folio.”

To show the Audubon, curator Melinda Hayes has it brought to a reading room in Doheny Library’s Special Collections. It looks like a burgundy leather slab, more than covering the round table in the center of the room. (Ever wonder why tables were bigger in old Europe, even though people were smaller? Maybe because the books were huge.)

Each volume (there are four) measures 39 inches high and 28 inches wide – 3 feet, 3 inches by 2 feet, 4 inches. Special Collections does not have a scale (Hayes rarely needs to know how much a book weighs), but suffice it to say it takes two librarians to convey a volume to the reading room.

Expedition members collecting algæ Aleksandr Postels Illustrationes algarum in itinere circa orbem jussu Imperatoris Nicolai I (1840) The book chronicles an expedition in 1826-1829 on the ship Seniavin to the Pacific Ocean, on behalf of Czar Nicholas I of Russia. The expedition was among the first undertaken on behalf of the Russian government. The book is among the most impressive in the collection for hand-colored illustrations of algæ.

The Audubon’s value is as ponderous as its size. According to Hayes, the last copy sold at auction for $8.8 million, purchased in 2000 by the emir of Qatar. It’s an amazing privilege to be able to flip through the Audubon, albeit with gloves and under close supervision. By contrast, the Huntington Library’s copy is kept under glass for all but a few privileged researchers.

As she turns the pages, Hayes explains the printing process. Each of Audubon’s original drawings was converted to a raised engraving on a copper plate. Paper was pressed onto the plate to make an outline of the drawing in black ink. Then the colors were filled in by hand, using the original drawing as a guide. There are four volumes in all with more than 400 plates, published from 1827 to 1838.

As more copies were made, the copper plates began to flatten. The Hancock copy was among the first, which means it is sharper than most of the 150 or so copies remaining worldwide.

It is easy to be awed by the detail of Audubon’s drawings. How could he have had the time and patience to capture such subtleties in moving animals?

Hayes points out that Audubon shot the birds before he drew them.

Birds of America is easily the most requested of the Hancock titles. That fact belies the strength of the collection, which includes a first American edition of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1860); Les Liliacées (1813) by Pierre Joseph Redouté, one of the most celebrated botanical illustrators; Description de L’Égypte (1809-28), the first modern catalogue of Egypt and its antiquities compiled by a team of experts at Napoleon’s behest; Konrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium (1551-87), a very early compendium of animal species; Micrographia (1665) by Robert Hooke, the famed scientist known for Hooke’s Law of elasticity and for his pioneering studies with the microscope; and Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1731), a precursor to Audubon’s work. Several of the collection’s volumes are valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

“This represents the second oldest collection of its kind in the United States,” says dean of university libraries Jerry Campbell. “We have built it now to some 120,000 carefully chosen volumes. It is an active, working collection. As such it constitutes the primary information resource for our students and faculty in environmental studies, geology and the life sciences.”

Columnar jointing in volcanic flow Barthélemy Faujas-de-Saint-Fond Recherches sur les volcans éteints du Vivarais et du Velay (1778) Faujas-de-Saint-Fond explored the hills of Vivarias and Velay in east central France, which held deposits of basalt. In this work he established that basalt was the product of volcanic action as demonstrated by the descriptions of the ancient volcanoes in this region. The phenomenon illustrated, known today as columnar jointing, shows the pattern of columns often found in solidified basaltic flow. This is an early example of geological works in the collection.

To say that Capt. Hancock brought this treasure to USC would be true – but not entirely accurate, says Dorothy Soule, one of the few remaining faculty members who was here when the collection arrived almost 60 years ago.

Soule was new to USC in the early ’40s, having landed a junior appointment in the biochemistry department when her G.I. husband was stationed out West. Soon she started hearing larger-than-life stories about Hancock, a self-made, self-taught, self-enriched entrepreneur. Hancock was only a boy when his father died in 1883, leaving a widow and sole surviving son land-rich and cash-poor. The family income depended mostly on tar from their property on Rancho La Brea, site of the now-famous tar pits. Young Allan would take the tar downtown in a wagon and sell it for roofing material and for lining horse troughs.

At the turn of the century, the oil boom hit and the family discovered it was sitting on a fortune. For Hancock, that was just the start. He went on to develop the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard, became one of the pioneers of the Automobile Club of America and, says Soule, “taught himself to pilot a plane, run a steam engine, captain any size vessel on any sea,” – hence the title Captain.

He also was a farmer, rancher, manufacturer and railroad magnate. But two of his interests in particular spelled “bingo” for USC: marine biology and cello playing.

Snowy Owls, John James Audubon The Birds of America (1827-1838)

Hancock owned a fleet used to ferry Mexican produce to Los Angeles. The ships caught the eye of scientists at the California Academy of Sciences and the San Diego Zoo, who asked him to undertake an ocean expedition to collect vertebrate species. There was one problem: Hancock was an avid cellist, and he was missing a pianist for the voyage. “He wanted his trio for after dinner,” Soule explains.

The organizers began making inquiries; eventually they turned to Irene McCulloch, USC professor of zoology, who introduced Hancock to John Garth ’32, MS ’35, PhD ’41, an organ major with a keen interest in crustaceans. Garth and a few other students went along on that first voyage and subsequent ones, including an expedition to the Galapagos Islands. When he wasn’t at the keyboard, Garth was under orders from McCulloch to collect invertebrates for USC.

McCulloch followed each plan with a bigger design. Securing an invertebrates collection was step one. Then she talked her benefactor into erecting a building for the newly created Hancock Foundation. Finally, says Soule, McCulloch “buttonholed him” on the need for a library.

“She convinced the Captain that it was well and good to have all these [specimen] collections, but if you’re going to [attract] anybody to work on them, you had to have a library. And she knew that the Boston Society had gone bankrupt, apparently, during the Depression.”

The Boston Society of Natural History did not actually go bust in the 1930s, but it did incur a large deficit. Forced to make tough choices, its members had decided to focus on running the New England Museum of Natural History, later known as the Boston Museum of Science. Research assets – including the incomparable book and journal collection – were to be sold to finance the new enterprise. It was a sad chapter for a century-old institution whose direct forerunner, the Linnaean Society of New England, had been only the second natural history organization in the United States. (The first, the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, was established two years before the Linnaean, in 1812.)

The Boston Society invited sealed bids for its collection. Hancock’s $100,000 offer beat all comers, including the Smithsonian. He had one condition: McCulloch and her students were to travel to Boston to personally inspect, wrap and pack each of the tens of thousands of items.

Pinnated Grous John James Audubon The Birds of America (1827-1838) Audubon’s double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America is the most famous ornithological work in history.

Assured that he had got what he paid for, Hancock gave permission for the shipment to depart for USC.

“I remember well when the trucks came,” says Soule, her eyes still wide from the memory. “It was raining, and we were hanging out the upstairs window watching them deliver all these books with utter amazement. I knew all about these famous names, but I never expected to see a book by Cuvier or Audubon. It boggled my mind to think that I was seeing those real books.”

McCulloch was known for her devotion to her students – she put up the poorest ones in her own house, and coaxed and nagged them all to achieve more than they ever thought possible. Only much later did the true value of the collection she had secured become clear, more so as McCulloch added to the holdings to make it a leading resource in marine science and invertebrate zoology.

“If it weren’t for that library, none of us would have been able to do [scholarship] on invertebrate marine zoology,” says Soule, now an emeritus research professor. “A number of students who went on to have distinguished careers at the Smithsonian [National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.] and the American Museum [of Natural History in New York] learned, from the ground up, with these books.”

She points overhead to her own shelves. There, by permission of the Hancock Foundation, sit several volumes from the collection. Though retired, Soule still actively publishes scientific papers on Bryozoa, marine invertebrates essential to the proper functioning of the food chain. In a time of electronic journals and online databases, the Hancock Collection still holds its mighty weight.