Last year, I assigned my first year illustration students to create a botanical, diagrammatical illustration (thinly veiling my proclivities toward science-ish, or science-looking things). I found out that at the same time, the second and third year students had been given the same assignment by teacher/designer/artist/bookmaker Ellen McMahon, only Ellen had an incredibly interesting and helpful book with which to guide them. Obviously, I stole it. (Ok, I asked very politely to borrow it…whatever.)

John Gilbert Wilkins’ Research: Design in Nature, 1931.

The book was created by Wilkins for the Art Institute of Chicago, particularly for the Field Museum, founded in 1893 (as the Columbian Museum) in Chicago with a mission of accumulating and disseminating knowledge, and preserving and exhibiting objects illustrating art, archaeology, science and history.

A detail of the cover.

The museum was founded to house biological and anthropological collections assembled for the Chicago’s World’s Fair in 1893, also known as the Columbian Exposition, as the event was in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the “new world.” Fun Factoid: 716,881 people attended the fair.

F.A. Brockhaus, Berlin und Wien, birds’ eye view of the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893.

The structure of the book is beautifully made and well-integrated to the loosely didactic, exploratory nature of the content, allowing readers to leaf through pages at will, changing the order of pages and organization of information. While the enclosed content isn’t indexed, causing obvious problems for scientists, it works as a kind of an informational art piece.

The book is bound with loose pages and housed in a cloth-covered case.

In 1905, the name of the museum changed to the Field Museum in honor of Marshall Field, the first major benefactor. This name change also illuminated the museum’s focus on the natural sciences.

The book is bound with loose pages and housed in a cloth-covered case.

In the 1920s and 30s (and maybe, and probably longer), Stanley Field, nephew of Marshall, was the museum president. And wouldn’t you know it, this book is inscribed from the prolific author to our very own Stanley Field, thereby elevating to unknown sums the value of the book, clearly indicating that I have no business with it.

The book is bound with loose pages and housed in a cloth-covered case.

Ellen, who has an undergraduate degree in ecology and a Masters in Scientific Illustration (in addition to her MFA in Visual Communications) acquired this book from a professor here at the University of Arizona. The professor, a collector of things, simply handed it to her. There apparently existed a second volume, however it has been lost. Without further ado, some of the book’s pages:

Sea Life (on left) and Shells, Construction & Design (on right).

A detail of the lovely page designs. Reminds me of a certain Alphonse Mucha.

The book is apparently available from Amazon for the whopping sum of $500 (a second copy is noted for $780). Wow. Anyway, my next project is to scan these pages, so they’ll be preserved in dots and pixels and TIFF files for digital eternity (so, a few years). Enjoy!