“THERE DOES NOT EXIST A MORE INTERESTING AND FASCINATING STUDY”: VERY SCARCE ORIGINAL PARTS OF HARRIS’ LARGE FOLIO FISHES OF NORTH AMERICA, COMPLETE WITH 40 BEAUTIFUL FOLIO CHROMOLITHOGRAPHS

HARRIS, William Charles. The Fishes of North America. New York: Harris Publishing, [1893]-98. Large folio, 20 original parts (measuring 12-1/2 by 19 inches), in original blue-gray printed wrappers, almost entirely unopened. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition of Harris’s vivid late 19th-century study of North American fish and angling. With 40 splendid chromolithographic plates of North American fish and over 100 in-text wood-engravings.

During 12 years of extensive field work, Harris and artist John L. Petrie traveled over 28,000 miles, from the eastern United States, north through Canada, west to Washington’s Spokane River and south to the Gulf of Mexico. Harris, editor of a popular weekly The American Angler, and author of The Angler’s Guide (1885) and The Sportsman’s Guide (1888), wrote of his passion for the sport and art that inspired this work. “As anglers we credit fish with all the best and worst sentiments and qualities of human nature; they love, they hate, they fight and fraternize; they reason a priori, are cunning and even thrifty… There does not exist a more interesting and fascinating study than that of our fish-fauna.” After Harris caught each fish, it was immediately rendered in oils by Petrie before any colors or tints faded. Forty of these paintings were then drawn on stone (some requiring as many as 15 stones to achieve the correct coloring) and the resulting vividly-colored chromolithographs, printed on canvas-finished stock, were remarkable for their fidelity to the original oil paintings. Harris had planned a two-volume work, but these 20 parts are all that were published. Text and plates loose as issued. Part XIX contains a general title page dated 1898. With scarce first state of the “Rainbow Trout” in Part VI, which was later altered. Sage, 110. Thacher, 244.

Plates in fine condition, with only occasional edge-wear. Two-inch hole to page 135, affecting text and illustration. Some chipping to edges of text and very fragile wrappers without loss of text. A very desirable set of unopened original parts, in extremely good overall condition. Scarce complete.