Castle Collection of Natural History Illustrations
Bryn Mawr College
The images in this collection all come from botanical and ornithological books that were given to Bryn Mawr College in 1971 by the bequest of Ethelinda Schaefer Castle, a member of the Class of 1908, a long-time resident of Honolulu, and an avid, discerning book collector. The bequest consisted of approximately 1500 books, now held by the Bryn Mawr College Special Collections Department. Its greatest strength lies in the roughly 400 illustrated botanical and ornithological works which document the development of those scientific fields from the late fifteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, including many of the works considered to be landmarks in each field.
This image database was created as part of a project to complete the cataloging of all of the books in the Castle Collection, and was funded by the Samuel N. and Mary Castle Foundation of Honolulu. Representative images from 168 books were digitized by the Albert M. Greenfield Digital Imaging Center at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. These are augmented by a small group of images digitized by Bryn Mawr College Special Collections. In all, the collection contains about 1300 images.
To avoid copyright infringement, illustrations were made only from books printed prior to 1920. For most books, including multi-volume sets, six illustrations were selected to be representative of the work as a whole. In addition, all of the plates in Peter Simon Pallas's Flora Rossica of 1784 were digitized. This on-line collection also includes all of the illustrations from Edward Lear's Illustrations of the family psittacidae, or parrots (1832), although the digital images were made from the copy of the book owned by the Academy of Natural Sciences, rather than from the copy in the Castle Collection.
The database is arranged alphabetically by book title. It may also be searched by book author, artist, type of bird or plant, date and place of publication, and medium. Such searches are best done from the "Advanced Search" page, with the search limited to the "Ethelinda Schaefer Castle Collection."
The cataloging of the images in the database was primarily the work of Jennifer Barr, '06. For information on reproducing the images in this collection, or for comments on the project or its metadata, please contact SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.
