Thursday, May 14, 2015

Bibliotheca Accipitraria

James Edmund Harting - Bibliotheca Accipitraria: A Catalog of Books Ancient and Modern Relating to Falconry (1891)

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Who knew there were so many books about falconry?  This bibliography lists 378 items in twenty languages and according to the preface it wasn't the first to attempt such a list.  All the works aren't devoted exclusively to falconry - Walton's The Compleat Angler gets an entry due to some discussion of the subject.  Certainly you'd need an unusually strong interest in either falconry or bibliography to dive into this - then again some of us actually are bibliographophiles and in any case it's a well-designed book.

Harting was an ornithologist who edited The Zoologist for a couple of decades.  His other works include Rambles in Search of Shells (1876) and British Animals Extinct within Historic Times (1880).