About Brown

Captain Thomas Brown (1785 – October 8, 1862)
was a British naturalist and malacologist. Born in Perth, Scotland, he was educated at the Edinburgh High School. At the age of twenty, he joined the Forfar and Kineardine Militia, raising to the rank of captain in 1811.

When he was quartered in Manchester, he became interested in nature, and edited Oliver Goldsmith's Animated Nature. After his regiment was disbanded, he bought the Fifeshire flax mill.

But this burned down before Thomas Brown had the opportunity to insure it. He then started to write books about nature for a living. In 1840 he became curator of the Manchester Museum for twenty-two years. He wrote several natural history books, a few dealing with conchology. He became a fellow of the Linnean Society, a member of the Wernerian, Kirwanian and Phrenological Societies, and president of the Royal Physical Society. Material from his books was used by US naturalist Thomas Wyatt for his book Manual of Conchology. Wyatt in turn hired Edgar Allan Poe to write a revised and less expensive version The Conchologist's First Book (1839). There was a shell named after him: Zebina browniana d'Orbigny, 1842.

About the original prints:

BROWN, T. Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Musignano. With the Addition of Numerous Recently Discovered Species and Representations of the Whole Sylva of North America.

The original from which these facsimiles are made is a superb copy of one of the scarcest colour-plate books on American ornithology from the library of Frederick Ducane Godman. Walter Faxon's census of copies of this work locates only seven complete and six incomplete. There have been only six complete copies at auction in the last twenty-five years. The title-page to this work refers only to the works by Wilson and Bonaparte, but included in the more than five hundred engravings are illustrations based on the works of Audubon, Selby and others. The index mentions that Brown added 161 birds to those covered by Wilson and Bonaparte, with a further 87 being "considerably enlarged." 'Brown's 'Illustrations of the American ornithology' of Wilson and Bonaparte (1831-1835), dazzles the eye, and a particularly lovely copy reposes in the Hill Collection' (Hill collection). There are 167 Trees and Shrubs represented, all of which are identified in the index. These plates display the best work of the leading engravers of Edinburgh at the time, including W.H. Lizars, who engraved the earliest of Audubon's plates and some of Selby's for his Illustrations of British Ornithology. The colouring in this original copy is particularly fine and the botanical additions, including the floral backgrounds are of the highest quality. The original is a very fine copy of an extremely rare work. .