WOODLANDS
by Oliver Rackham
Collins, £45; 592pp
LAST YEAR THE NEW Naturalist library celebrated its 60th birthday. This famous series of natural history books began with a bang when 40,000 copies of the first titles, Butterflies and London’s Natural History, were sold within a year.
The publishing world had been expecting Collins’s venture into “serious” natural history to flop at the first fence. At 16 shillings each (rising to a guinea soon after) the books cost twice as much as most contemporary hardbacks.
Nor were they easy reading. Written by experts in their field, many of them university professors, they “presented the results of modern scientific research” with a minimum of concession to the intellectually challenged.
And yet it worked. In its first ten years, the Golden Age you might say, the bookshelves of England became home to a quarter of a million New Naturalists in 30 titles, ranging from tomes on mammals, moths and wild orchids to seemingly haphazard subjects such as An Angler’s Entomology and The Art of Botanical Illustration. At first the idea was to stop at 50 volumes. That tape was crossed in 1967.
But the New Naturalists were unstoppable. We have now arrived at the first one hundred. It is Woodlands by Oliver Rackham, a state-of-the-art survey of Britain’s trees and woods by the acknowledged expert in the field.
Advertisement
Rackham is the guy who, 30 years ago, first drew attention to the history of our neglected native woods and inspired a new generation of eco-foresters. He seems to know woods like old friends, each with its unique past, its cranky or capricious personality, and its hoard of secrets. And he writes like an angel. This is a worthy 100th edition.
Woodlands comes exactly 50 years after the first New Naturalist about woods. Entitled Trees, Woods and Men, and by H.L. Edlin, the distinguished forester, it was essentially about the violent replacement of old woods with dense-packed plantations of conifers, analogous with the way old town centres were being ripped out to make way for car parks and shopping malls. With Rackham’s book we return full circle to something of the reverence felt for trees by earlier generations.
And that’s one of the wonders of the New Naturalist books. They are not only a permanent landmark in the frenetic world of books. They also chart the twists and turns of our relationship with the living world. In the 1950s ecology and the study of animal behaviour had invigorated field study.
The New Naturalists kept apace with discoveries in evolution and genetics, migration, geology and biogeography. But they were presented in the homely and familiar context of British natural history.
The authors were naturalists as well as scientists, and they wrote in clear non-jargonistic English without blinding us with data. The best of the books were a happy marriage of the field and the lab.
Advertisement
Yet I suspect that the ultimate reason for the success of the New Naturalists is not so much the science as their collectability. They look good. They are of equal octavo size, which in my opinion is the perfect size for non-fiction (a pox on those A4, bottom-shelf monstrosities). They are bound in stout green buckram, which, I understand, is hard to get hold of these days.
The early ones contained up to 48 colour plates, which was a big selling point in the postwar years of paper rationing. And in those days the text was printed in good black type on matt, off-white paper that smells agreeably of fresh-cut hay in summer meadows.
But the touch of genius, the twitch of the wand that turned them from mere literary commodities into works of art, is surely the jackets. The vivid, smudgy, lithographs that defines the series were the work of Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, a husband-and-wife artistic team who designed nearly all the jackets up to 1985 (apart from a brief, misguided foray into photographic wrappers in the mid-Sixties). Their designs have become icons of the trade: those swirling, fungoid shapes on the front of Mushrooms and Toadstools or the night-owl composed of dots and squiggles swooping at the reader in Folklore of Birds.
In the past 20 years the jackets have been designed in the same spirit by the well-known bird artist Robert Gillmor, who uses linocuts and other craft techniques to create similarly bold and original designs.
New Naturalist collectors, of whom I reckon there must be at least a couple of thousand, display their gleaming, jacketed books in places normally reserved for Ming vases or Chippendale tables. And that is because a full set of first editions in tip-top jackets is worth as much as a Ming vase. One was sold recently for £20,000.
Advertisement
Bear that in mind when you part with your 45 hard-earned pounds for Woodlands. But, more importantly, you will be holding in your hand a piece of publishing history, the embodiment of a British tradition of natural history. Perhaps the New Naturalist idea, like Oliver Rackham’s beloved woods, is immortal.