2 volumes, elephant folio (650 x 490 mm). Engraved titles, 218 hand-colored engraved plates and 4 uncolored by Selby and W.H. Lizars after drawings by Selby, Robert Mitford, Edward Lear, and William Jardine. (A few plates slightly remargined, some trimmed short, title-pages with a few vertical creases.) 20th-century half calf antique, contemporary marbled boards (hinges reinforced).

SELBY'S "GREATEST WORK WILL EVER BE DEEMED HIS CELEBRATED ILLUSTRATIONS OF BRITISH ORNITHOLOGY..., OUR ENGLISH EQUIVALENT OF AUDUBON'S FAMOUS WORK" (Mullens and Swann, p.518).

Selby "was very gifted as an artist, and the two volumes of Illustrations of British Ornithology are outstandingly beautiful. In many people's estimation, the clarity and crispness of his figures gives them an austere beauty that is lacking in the pretty lithographs of H. L. Meyer's and John Gould's books....The cool, classical quality of Selby's plates belongs to the age of elegance and could have never been achieved by the Victorian John Gould. Selby's bird figures were the most accurate delineations of British birds to that date, and the livliest. After so many books with small, stiff bird portraits, this new atlas with its life-size figures and more relaxed drawing was a great achievement in the long history of bird illustration" (Jackson).

The plates of Illustrations of British Birds were begun in 1821, and issued over the following 13 years in 19 parts, from which the present set (which bear watermarks ranging from 1818 to 1833) was bound up. The irregular intervals in which the work was issued are reflected in the erratic numbering of the plates and consequently, there is no consensus about what constitutes a first edition. Ayer/Zimmer 571; Fine Bird Books 141; Jackson, Etchings 201-13; Jackson, Lithography 33, 51; McGill/Wood 561; Nissen, IVB 853.