Vintage Nature Books

Several weeks ago I was wasting some time in a used book store in East Lansing and came across this 1965 book called Herbal.

Though the cover shows wear, the pages inside look like they've rarely been thumbed through. This book is an interesting compendium of herbal remedies, superstitions, and legitimate medical and culinary uses for various plants. Every other page is a full page woodcut of the plant in question, 100 of them, all taken from a 1544 folio, like this wood fern:

And there are six mustard colored pages with various animals, like the hare:

This beautiful book cost me $9. I could probably rip it apart and sell each woodcut for $20 a piece, which would net me around $2,111. Tempting, especially since it's not an actual antique (remember, these are just reprints made in the 1960s). But much of the charm of this book is found in the actual information it provides, the text—which is written in a refreshingly entertaining and frank way. From the introduction:

The present volume aims simply to entertain (and perhaps inform) those who share the author's interest in the facts and fancies which constituted our forefather's knowledge of the world of plants, and who find in it a charm for which the grimmer science of our own day offers no equivalent. . . .

Closely regarded, every one of the individual plants will be found useful, beautiful, or wonderful—and not infrequently all three. Perhaps the chief charm of the Herbalists (and certainly the one this book would like to especially suggest) is just that they are more likely than the modern scientist to impart a sense of beauty and wonder—both of which the scientist may feel, but considers it no part of his function to communicate.

And if you've read my blog for very long, you know that I'm all about honing our sense of beauty and wonder.

Ironically, during the same trip to said bookstore, I picked up a few Golden Guides on non-flowering plants (as I had just been remarking to my husband earlier this year I wished I had a book to identify mushrooms), fossils (since we run into a fair number of aquatic fossils in Michigan, which was once entirely under water), spiders (another recent wish of mine), and pond life (since there's a lot of that in my state).

Golden Guides are the polar opposite to the herbal. While the herbal gives center stage to the beauty of the plants featured, each one filling up an entire page, Golden Guides try to stuff as many little drawings onto each page as possible. The herbal is roughly 9 x 12 inches. A Golden Guide is roughly 4 x 6 inches. The herbal uses poetic language and gives you a lot of information about each plant. The Golden Guide usually offers no more than a run-on sentence or two, giving the barest of information needed for identification.

They serve two different purposes and are thus very different books. As it turns out, I already had the guide on pond life, though in a later edition with a totally different cover (which might explain why I didn't remember). I also already had one on insects and one specifically on moths and butterflies, which was purchased new within the last few years. Yep, they are still reprinting these little suckers. The used ones I got cost $2-3 each. A new one doesn't run you that much more.

I'm willing to bet many of you have at least one of these floating around your house (or perhaps at your parents' or grandparents' homes).