1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
1,300 Beautiful Wildlife Illustrations from the 19th Century Now Restored
19 世纪 1,300 幅精美野生动物插画现已完成修复
Today, if you want to know about any of the flora or fauna that surround us, you have only to look it up online. After you get your fill of knowledge, you can decide whether or not you want to venture out into the world and see your object of interest in its natural environment (or a controlled simulation thereof). In the Victorian era, things worked a bit differently. Ideally, you’d have grown up in a household, or at least had access to an institution, with the complete set of The Naturalist’s Library, a series of more than 40 volumes on everything from the birds and the bees to the quadrupeds and the marsupialia. Printed in a relatively small format and priced at six shillings each, they brought the intellectual fruits of the naturalist’s enterprise closer to the reach of the everyman than ever before.
如今，如果你想了解周围的任何动植物，只需上网搜索即可。在获取了足够的知识后，你可以决定是否要走进现实世界，去亲眼看看你感兴趣的对象（或者去看看它的模拟环境）。在维多利亚时代，情况则大不相同。理想情况下，你需要在拥有全套《博物学家图书馆》（The Naturalist’s Library）的家庭中长大，或者至少能接触到拥有这套丛书的机构。这套丛书包含 40 多卷，涵盖了从鸟类、昆虫到四足动物和有袋动物等方方面面的知识。它们以相对较小的开本印刷，每册售价六先令，这使得博物学研究的智力成果比以往任何时候都更接近普通大众。
While these books offered a good deal of informative text, including memoirs from various famous naturalists of the time, their immediate attraction had more to do with their glorious illustrations, in which colored examples of each species popped right out of its black-and-white habitat. These more than 1,300 color plates, some of the finest that could be seen in any publication of similar scale in the mid-nineteenth century, presented an attractive project to the designer Nicholas Rougeux, whose work we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture. Having already restored and created digital versions of Euclid’s Elements, Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s Les Roses and Les Liliacées, Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants, and Daniel Berkeley Updike’s Printing Types, among other books, he’s now put online a complete reproduction of The Naturalist’s Library — with, as usual, a blog post about the painstaking restoration and digital re-creation process.
虽然这些书籍提供了大量信息丰富的文本，包括当时多位著名博物学家的回忆录，但它们最直接的吸引力在于其精美的插图——书中每个物种的彩色样本在黑白背景的栖息地中显得格外醒目。这 1,300 多幅彩色图版是 19 世纪中期同类出版物中最精美的作品之一，对于设计师尼古拉斯·鲁若（Nicholas Rougeux）来说，这是一个极具吸引力的项目，我们之前曾在 Open Culture 上介绍过他的作品。他此前已经修复并数字化了欧几里得的《几何原本》（Elements）、皮埃尔-约瑟夫·雷杜德（Pierre-Joseph Redouté）的《玫瑰图谱》（Les Roses）和《百合图谱》（Les Liliacées）、伊丽莎白·特怀宁（Elizabeth Twining）的《植物自然目插图》（Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants）以及丹尼尔·伯克利·厄普代克（Daniel Berkeley Updike）的《印刷字体》（Printing Types）等书籍。现在，他将《博物学家图书馆》的完整复刻版发布到了网上，并一如既往地撰写了一篇博客文章，详细介绍了艰苦的修复和数字化重建过程。
This time, Rougeux has included a section about his use of artificial intelligence, which actually did its part to bring The Naturalist’s Library to his attention in the first place. Not only did AI tools then help him unearth needed sources and fill in visual gaps, they also came in handy when he was brainstorming cover concepts for a printed version. Though Rougeux’s restoration is primarily a website, free to all to explore, you can also buy your own handsome, large-format physical copy of Plates of the Naturalist’s Library for $295.11 USD.
这一次，鲁若专门增加了一个章节，讲述了他对人工智能的使用。事实上，正是人工智能让他最初注意到了《博物学家图书馆》。AI 工具不仅帮助他挖掘了所需的资料并填补了视觉上的空白，还在他为印刷版构思封面概念时派上了用场。虽然鲁若的修复项目主要是一个供所有人免费探索的网站，但你也可以花 295.11 美元购买一套精美的大开本实体书《博物学家图书馆图版》（Plates of the Naturalist’s Library）。
Easier on the wallet is the series of posters he’s made with the same illustrations, each of which presents one of these categories of creatures great or small at a glance.
如果想更省钱，他利用同样的插图制作了一系列海报，每一张海报都能让你一目了然地欣赏到这些大大小小的生物类别。