The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany

by Graeme Gibson

Book Overview

Featuring a new foreword by Margaret Atwood

In this stunning assemblage of words and images, novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson offers an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humans and
birds.

From the Aztec plumed serpent to the Christian dove to Plato's vision of the human soul growing wings, religion and philosophy use birds to represent our aspirational selves. Winged creatures appear...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385547137
• ISBN13: 9780385547130
• Release Date: March 2021
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A treat for birders and lovers of folktales in the natural history vein.

I purchased this book as a gift for my Aunt Jen, to whom I am deeply grateful for instilling in me a love of the outdoors in general and a love of birds in particular. She is now mostly confined to a bed and I wanted to get her a book on an outdoor subject she loves which she can enjoy while indoors. Before sending her the book I was able to get a good look at it and I feel confident she will enjoy it. The book is beautifully illustrated and the stories are well-written. All of them are interesting, some are humorous. I highly recommend this book.

This One's Special

A beautiful book, excellent for a gift as well as for one's own library. The illustrations are many, varied, and lovely. The text is engrossing.

A marvelous confection...

I found this book in the gift shop of the Point Reyes National Seashore visitor center on a recent trip to Inverness and had to own it. As an artifact it's quite beautiful: the illustrations and text and heft of the volume is sumptuous. This is, as the name says, a bedside book; a substantial hardcover with a creamy, coated-stock dustcover instead of a slick and glossy coffeetable book. The point of it is to open the volume and read. Many such books are just random tidbits that catch the collector's fancy or have some private meaning to the person pulling the work together but which don't form a larger, coherent work. Somehow, though, this book seems to have an ebb and flow that seems natural, as if Gibson himself it taking ownership of the words, the images, the flavors here. I bought the book for feel and flavor, but am pleased to note that it is worth owning as a volume in its own right, a perfect bedside companion. Highly recommended.

WOW!

This is among the most beautiful books I have ever owned. An exquisite collection of poems, stories, journal entries and reveries about birds that is complemented by extraordinary, rich artwork throughout. Graeme Gibson's careful choices bring out the intrigue, the mystery, the beauty and mythical qualities of birds throughout the world. A lavishly published work of the highest standard, I didn't think books like this were still made. I've ordered more copies to give to friends because I really haven't seen anything else like it.

An artistic and literary tome on birds

This book is a sumptuous, lusciously illustrated homage to birds of all sorts.. common and exotic. It is printed on rich, delicately tintured stock, which frames the splendid artwork that accompanies each contribution. It is composed of poems, meditations, folklore, sagas, journal notes, involving birds, from people who've been inspired.. or irritated by them. The artwork includes famous Audubon watercolours, oils, aboriginal renditions in sculpture or stone paintings, statuary, mobiles and all sorts of depictions. Gibson is a lifelong birdwatcher and collector of arcane literary and artistic tomes on birds. Birds have always been providential for man, omens of good or evil tidings. Creation stories are replete with birds, they are clarions of peace, of messianic proclamation or of disaster. They include the dove, clasping the olive branch to the raven, the trickster, the wolfbird, harbinger of bad times. They can be objects of veneration, of beauty, of song.. or they can be pest birds, that could ruin a crop, or spread disease in overcrowded cities. Modern man's relationship with the bird has always been ambiguous. It is shot for sport, roasted for his plate, it is adopted as symbol for nations, it is a muse for writers and artists. They represent characteristics of fierceness, nobility, piety, beauty, purity.. or connivance with dark forces. Gibson relates the story of the 19th Century Lutheran Pastor in Dresden who called for the extermination of the sparrow for its incessant chattering and scandalous acts of unchastity during service. Or of the adventurer, who having killed what was likely the last of the Dodos, lamented only that he had not saved the beak and skull for posterity. The book is chock full of the mundane, the profound and the mythical. The book begins (almost) and ends with the birds of the Western Front. Whose singing always re-sounded on the destroyed landscapes of Flanders before and after the mechanistic slaughter of battles that engulfed mankind in the First World War. They gave a faint promise of grace to those in the trenches below. Bird lovers and those whose main preoccupation is the racket outside their window or the droppings in their public places will all find solace in this book.