The Birds of America: The Story Behind the World's Most Expensive Book
A book so large it takes two people to lift it. So rare that fewer than 120 complete copies survive. So beautiful that institutions compete fiercely for the privilege of owning one. The story of John James Audubon's The Birds of America is not just the story of a book. It is the story of one man's impossible ambition — and of what happens when obsession, artistry and sheer stubbornness combine to produce something the world has never seen before.
An Impossible Ambition
In the early 1820s, John James Audubon was a failed merchant living in Kentucky, bankrupt and briefly imprisoned for debt, earning his living as a portrait painter and dance teacher. He was also, in every spare moment, producing what would become the greatest natural history publication in history.
His goal was staggering in its simplicity: to paint every species of bird in North America, at life size, in its natural habitat, showing each creature alive, in motion, in the specific American landscape it inhabited. Not as a pinned specimen in a museum drawer. Not as a stiff engraving in a scientific catalogue. As a living thing — dramatic, precise, and utterly itself.
To achieve this, he needed paper large enough to depict even the biggest birds — a great blue heron, a whooping crane, a wild turkey — at their actual dimensions. He found it in the format known as double-elephant folio: sheets of handmade paper measuring approximately 66 by 99 centimetres, the largest available anywhere in the early 19th century. On those vast sheets, he would arrange his subjects in dramatic, sometimes contorted poses — bending a heron's neck into an elegant curve, positioning a golden eagle mid-dive — to fit life-size birds onto even the most generous paper.
The Method: Wire, Paint and Sixty Hours
Audubon's technique was radical for its time, and controversial even among his admirers. He worked primarily from freshly killed specimens, which he mounted on wire armatures — a complex system of supports that allowed him to hold a bird in any pose he chose for as long as he needed. He pinned his subjects to boards marked with a grid, which he transferred to his paper, maintaining perfect proportions across sheets nearly a metre tall.
His primary medium was watercolour, supplemented with pastel, chalk, gouache, graphite and occasionally oil. He worked with extraordinary patience and intensity — contemporaries reported that he sometimes spent sixty hours on a single composition, building up layers of colour and detail in a way that was closer to painting than to scientific draughtsmanship. The result was images that seem to vibrate with life: the individual barbs of each feather, the tension in a crane's extended leg, the gloss on a black crow's wing in winter light.
The botanical settings were equally meticulous. Audubon understood that a bird divorced from its environment is a bird half-explained. So his great blue heron stands in the shallows of a Carolina marsh. His Carolina parakeets jostle on a cocklebur branch. His passenger pigeon perches on the stem that its species — now extinct — once stripped bare by the million. These are not illustrations. They are portraits of a world.
John James Audubon (1785–1851)
Tricolored Heron (Egretta tricolor), Havell pl. 217, 1832 Watercolor, graphite, pastel, gouache, white lead pigment, and black ink with scratching out and selective glazing on paper, laid on card; 21 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.
(54.6 x 74.9 cm)
The Journey to London
By the mid-1820s, Audubon had accumulated hundreds of watercolours and a burning conviction that no American publisher would take on a project of this scale and ambition. In 1826, he sailed to Britain with 250 original drawings packed in a tin case, carrying letters of introduction and an instinct for self-promotion that would prove as essential as his artistic genius.
He exhibited his work in Liverpool, Edinburgh and London, charging admission and cultivating the persona of the "American Woodsman" — a Romantic-era image of the rugged frontier naturalist that delighted British audiences hungry for the mythology of the New World. The press was enraptured. Subscriptions began to flow.
In Edinburgh, he found his first engraver, William Home Lizars, who began work on the opening plates. When Lizars's colourists went on strike, Audubon moved to London and found the man who would define the look of the entire publication: Robert Havell Jr., whose family firm would spend the next thirteen years translating Audubon's watercolours into hand-coloured copperplate engravings of staggering refinement. The collaboration between painter and engraver was one of the great artistic partnerships of the 19th century.
435 Plates, 497 Species, Thirteen Years
The Birds of America was published by subscription between 1827 and 1838 — a thirteen-year project that tested Audubon's finances, health and resolve at every turn. Subscribers paid approximately $1,000 for a complete set (around $35,000 in today's money), receiving prints in instalments of five at a time, delivered in tin cases: one large bird, one medium-sized bird, three smaller species. Eighty-seven such instalments were required to complete the work.
The subscriber list read like a roll-call of the 19th-century establishment: King George IV, the King of France, the Library of Congress, Harvard University, Columbia University, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Audubon spent years criss-crossing the Atlantic to maintain his subscriber base, drum up new patrons, and collect new specimens from the American wilderness — still travelling, still drawing, even as the presses ran in London.
When the final plate was delivered in 1838, the complete work comprised 435 hand-coloured engravings depicting 497 species of North American birds — including five that are now extinct: the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, the Labrador duck, the great auk, and the heath hen. It was, and remains, the most comprehensive visual record of American birdlife ever made.
The Book Itself: A Physical Marvel
The double-elephant folio edition of The Birds of America is, quite apart from its artistic content, a feat of physical production almost without parallel. Each set, once bound, comprised four monumental volumes standing over a metre tall. A complete set weighs approximately 88 kilograms — nearly 200 pounds. The Library of Congress has noted that it takes at least two people to lift one of these volumes.
Each of the 435 plates was engraved on copper, printed, and then hand-coloured by a team of colourists working under Havell's supervision. The colouring was done with watercolour and gouache applied with fine brushes, plate by plate, copy by copy — an industrial-scale exercise in manual artistry. Some plates required up to eighteen separate colours; others demanded four complete attempts before Audubon approved the result.
Around 200 complete sets were produced and sold. Of these, scholars estimate that 41 were subsequently broken apart — their individual plates sold separately to feed the market for loose Audubon prints — and at least 10 were destroyed. Today, approximately 120 complete sets are believed to survive, held by museums, libraries and private collectors worldwide. When a complete set comes to auction, it is a global event. In 2010, a complete set sold at Sotheby's for £7.3 million — at the time, the highest price ever paid for a printed book.
An Elegy as Much as a Celebration
There is a melancholy footnote to the story of The Birds of America that Audubon could not have foreseen. Several of the species he depicted with such loving precision were already in decline at the time he painted them. Within decades of the publication's completion, the passenger pigeon — once the most numerous bird in North America, darkening the sky in flocks of billions — had been hunted to extinction. The last known individual died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The Carolina parakeet, the only parrot native to the eastern United States, was gone by 1918.
Audubon's plates are, for these vanished species, the most vivid records that exist. A passenger pigeon in The Birds of America is not a scientific specimen in a jar. It is a creature painted by a man who had watched it alive, who had stood beneath the flocks and heard the thunder of their wings. In this sense, The Birds of America is not only a monument of art and science. It is an elegy — an involuntary memorial to a world already beginning to disappear as Audubon painted it.
Where to See The Birds of America Today
Complete sets of the double-elephant folio are on public display at institutions including the Natural History Museum in London, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and the Audubon Museum at John James Audubon State Park in Henderson, Kentucky. Many institutions also make high-resolution digital scans of their copies freely available online.
Original Audubon watercolours — the paintings from which the engravings were made — are held primarily at the New-York Historical Society, which owns the largest single collection. Seeing them in person, at their original scale, is one of the great experiences available to anyone who cares about art, nature, or the history of either.
Bring Audubon Home
The original double-elephant folio may be beyond reach — but the vision it carries is not. Wallango offers museum-quality reproductions of Audubon's most iconic plates, printed on thick archival paper with the colour fidelity and detail that these extraordinary images demand.
→ Explore our John James Audubon collection