On the Birds Collected by Professor J.B. Steere in the Philippine Archipelago,

FIRST EDITION, complete monograph from ‘ The Transactions of the Linnean Society of London’, 9 hand coloured lithograph plates by Keulemans, pages unopened, original printed salmon wrappers, 4to, London, Taylor and Francis, 1877

Richard Bowdler Sharpe curator of the bird collection at the British Museum. He wrote half of the 27 volumes of ‘the Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum’, after formally describing and coining the Latin names for 233 species of bird. He was also responsible for the museum acquiring the private collections of wealthy collectors including Hume, Seebohm, Shelley and Gould. For his work in 1891 he was awarded a gold medal by the Emperor of Austria. He was a fellow of the Linnean Society and the Zoological Society of London. The Linnean Society of London is the world’s oldest active biological society, founded in 1788 by Sir James Edward Smith, who was its first President.