Audubon Birds of America: the Octavo Edition, Volumes and Plates

A complete four-volume set of the double-elephant folio weighs 193.6 pounds, according to the Library of Congress, which weighed its own copy volume by volume. The octavo edition of the same work fits on a shelf: seven volumes, 500 plates, each bird’s account printed beside its picture. That second form is the one this section follows. When people search for the Audubon Birds of America, they usually mean one of these two editions without saying which, and most confusion about plate numbers starts there.

Two editions of the Audubon Birds of America

The folio came first. It was printed between 1827 and 1838 as 435 hand-colored plates depicting 489 species, on sheets about 26 inches wide by 38 inches tall. William H. Lizars began the engraving and Robert Havell took over. Roughly 300 subscribers paid about $1,000 each over the years of publication; about 200 complete folios were produced, and just over 100 survive. The text was not bound with the plates. Audubon issued it separately as the Ornithological Biography, five volumes published at Edinburgh from 1831 to 1839, written with the Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray.

The octavo edition is a different object, not a shrunken copy. Herrick’s biography of Audubon records that it began to appear in parts late in 1839 and was in press for four years, illustrated with 500 lithographic plates that John Woodhouse Audubon reduced from his father’s originals. Composite folio plates were broken up, many new plants appeared, seventeen new birds were added to the last volume, and the text was corrected and revised. It also sold. The published subscriber lists counted 1,198 names, with 198 from Boston, 164 from Baltimore and 141 from New York.

For reading rather than looking, the octavo is the better book. The plate and the account are together, the errors of the folio years are partly fixed, and the plates are numbered in one simple run.

The octavo edition in seven volumes

The Birds of America octavo edition was published by Audubon in New York with J. B. Chevalier in Philadelphia, and J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia lithographed and colored the plates. The volume years below come from the title pages of the Smithsonian Libraries set; the plate ranges from the plates themselves.

Volume	Title-page year	Plates
I	1840	1 to 70
II	1841	71 to 140
III	1841	141 to 210
IV	1842	211 to 280
V	1842	281 to 350
VI	1843	351 to 420
VII	1844	421 to 500

Inside each volume the accounts follow Audubon’s classification of the day, family by family, with short introductions to each genus. Volume V, for instance, opens with the doves: the Zenaida Dove at plate 281, then the Key West Pigeon, the Ground Dove, the Blue-headed Pigeon, the Passenger Pigeon at 285 and the Carolina Turtle-Dove at 286, before the turkey and the grouse.

John James Audubon, 1785 to 1851

John James Audubon was born on April 26, 1785, at Les Cayes in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. Herrick found the only surviving record of the birth in a doctor’s bill. He was raised in France, around his father’s home near Nantes, returned to America in the autumn of 1803 at eighteen, and spent years in business in Kentucky; the National Audubon Society’s biography notes that while running a dry-goods store in Henderson he bought and sold enslaved people, and that he later wrote critically about emancipation.

The business failed. Drawing birds, which had been a habit, became the plan. In 1826 he took his portfolio to Britain, found engravers in Edinburgh and London and enough subscribers to start printing, and spent the next twelve years seeing the folio through. He then settled in New York, produced the octavo, and turned to The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a work on mammals carried on with his sons and John Bachman. John James Audubon died at his home, Minnie’s Land, in New York on January 27, 1851, and is buried in Trinity Cemetery at 155th Street and Broadway.

Reading the plate pages and their numbers

Each plate page on this site gives three references, and they are easy to mix up. The first is the octavo plate number, which Audubon printed in Roman numerals (plate CCLXXXVI is 286). The second is the volume and page where the account begins, which is how the text can be checked against a scan. The third is the number in the page address.

That address number is the site’s own running count of text sections within a volume. In volume V the count opens at 00500 with the Zenaida Dove, and the short genus introductions count as sections, so the Passenger Pigeon is 00505 and the Carolina Turtle-Dove 00506. It matches neither the plate nor the page. Folio plate numbers, where a page mentions them, are a fourth sequence again: the same Mourning Dove is plate 17 in the folio.

Plates and accounts in this section

Six pages are here now. The Carolina Turtle-Dove, octavo plate 286, describes the plate, quotes the opening of Audubon’s account from volume V and compares it with the folio’s “Carolina Pigeon, or Turtle Dove.” The extinct birds in Audubon’s Birds of America gathers the species that have been lost since he painted them, with the volume, plate and page for each, and separates the four extinct species from the birds whose status is still argued over.

Four single-bird pages follow the same pattern. The Ivory-billed Woodpecker, plate 256 and the Imperial Woodpecker account, which Audubon marked as not figured, sit beside the Golden-winged Woodpecker, plate 273, today’s Northern Flicker. The Pied Duck, plate 400, is the Labrador Duck, now extinct.

Every page quotes the Audubon Birds of America octavo text directly and gives the page, so every passage can be checked against the 1840s printing. The rest of the site deals with the living birds of the same yards and woods; the index lists it, including the birdhouse guide for the cavity-nesting birds that people can still help.

One detail of the octavo’s history is easy to miss. The first number, Herrick reports, was ready on December 3, 1839, in a printing of 300 copies, and within little more than a month 300 more were demanded.