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The Publishers
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The
Hill House Facsimile collection began in 1987 when "Butterfly-Man"
Bernard d'Abrera and his wife Lucilla of Hill House Publishers in
association with the Department of Library Services at the British
Museum (Natural History) (The Natural History Museum, London)
commenced research into new printing techniques for the production
of facsimiles from antiquarian works....
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| These early experiments proved so successful that Hill House were granted an exclusive licence to reproduce the complete works of John Gould in authentic facsimile from the Museum`s own series of originals. |
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Goulds
Humming Birds; a challenging facsimile project
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Like all Goulds previous publications the Monograph of the Trochilidae (Hummingbirds) was issued in parts to subscribers but it was his most ambitious project and posed several new problems. One of these was that despite all his endeavours to form a complete collection of hummingbirds Gould was a late starter in the field and many species eluded him. ............................
For a sight of these he was forced to borrow from public museums and private collectors in Europe and South America, and to conduct extensive correspondence with naturalists in the field having personal knowledge of the birds. A unique problem with the illustrations was how to capture accurately on paper the characteristic iridescent plumage of the male birds (the females mostly being comparatively dull). Gould had to invent a special technique using a combination of transparent oil and varnish colours over silver leaf to overcome this difficulty. With the release of the Hummingbirds, ( Volume II ) in 1994, Hill House Publishers had developed a method of being able to give an impression of the plates being 'metallised' without adopting the rigorous (and now impossible) methods first used by Gould and his artists. The Hill House method involves the use of the combination of gloss inks and subtle varnishes to simulate this effect in the facsimile volumes. Part of the extreme difficulty in this method lies in the precision needed to apply the inks and varnishes to the specific small areas where the effect is needed. .............
Hill House believe that no other attempts at reproducing the Gould hummingbirds have been as pioneering nor as successful in this regard. This method, even though modern, is so painstaking and exacting that it cannot be applied to huge numbers of prints, thereby making even more precious the copies published in the Hill House "John Gould" Collection
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