Giraffe

Le Jardin des Plantes

Le Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris, France, is a small zoo within the larger botanical gardens (Jardin des Plantes) which are part of the Museum of Natural History. Founded with animals from the menagerie of Versailles, which was dismantled in 1795 during the French Revolution, it is the second-oldest zoo in the world. This book, written by botanist and geologist Pierre Boitard, features beautiful etchings of many of the animals found in the zoo and botanical gardens. By 1845, when this second edition was published, Paris had the largest exotic animal collection in Europe.

Les Obseruations de Plusieurs Singularitez et Choses Memorables...


by Pierre Belon. Paris, 1554.
This work is the narrative of a French naturalist's travels in the Middle East in the 16th century, presenting to Western eyes the earliest illustrations of a giraffe and other wonders; the original vellum cover on our copy, now very dry and stiff, is a "re-cycled" Arabic manuscript. The pages of this important work will need to be specially cleaned and flattened, and the broken binding re-sewn, using materials and methods appropriate to the book's period, to reduce stress on the structure.