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LOUDON, Jane.

Facts from the World of Nature, Animate and Inanimate.

Facts from the World of Nature, Animate and Inanimate.

With an engraving on steel, and numerous illustrations on wood.

Stock Code 113921

London, Grant and Griffith, 1848

Regular price $826 USD
Regular price Sale price $826 USD
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By the author of the mummy!. First and apparently only edition of this less well-known book on general science for young people by one of the great Victorian popularisers of botany. Rare on the market, and Worldcat locates only thirteen institutional copies. The contents cover geology, bodies of water, the atmosphere, and animals (mammals, birds, and fish).

Loudon began writing to support her family after her father's death. 'In addition to Prose and Verse (1824) she published anonymously The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), a pioneering work of science fiction that brought together political commentary, Egyptomania, and interest in technology' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Loudon worked closely with her husband, the landscape designer John Loudon, and she also attended lectures by the botanist John Lindley. In her own writing she 'tapped the ready market for books popularizing horticulture, botany, and natural history. Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840) was hugely successful; 1350 copies were sold on the day of publication alone. The Ladies Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (1840), the first in a much-reprinted series of informative illustrated books, was followed by others about bulbs, greenhouse plants, and perennials... Jane Loudon also brought information about the natural system of plant classification to popular audiences, in The First Book of Botany... for Schools and Young Persons (1841) and Botany for Ladies (1842)' (ODNB).

First edition; 8vo; steel engraved frontispiece and wood engravings throughout the text, front free endpaper lacking, frontispiece foxed, contents faintly toned in the margins with occasional tiny spots; original green cloth elaborately blocked in gilt to the spine and in blind to the boards, yellow coated endpapers, contemporary bookseller's ticket of Brooke & Co., Doncaster, to the front pastedown, corners, joints, and ends of spine worn, edges of boards toned, some marks and spots to the cloth, very good condition; 390pp.

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