Assouline
The Impossible Collection of Fashion
The hundred most iconic dresses of the twentieth century, hand-bound.
$995.00
Ernst Haeckel, Actiniae, from Kunstformen der Natur, 1904. via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Taschen
Seba. Cabinet of Natural Curiosities
The eighteenth-century cabinet of wonders, reproduced whole.
$200.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Albertus Seba; Irmgard Müsch et al.
- Publisher
- Taschen
- Published
- January 2005
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
A Cabinet That Outlived Its Contents
Albertus Seba, an Amsterdam apothecary grown rich on the port's trade, assembled the most famous natural history collection of his day, sold it entire to Peter the Great, and promptly built a second one. From 1734 he published his Thesaurus, a four-volume engraved inventory of that second cabinet, snakes, shells, corals, insects and crocodiles arranged in the ornamental symmetries of the age, completed by others after his death in 1736 and financed in part by auctioning the specimens themselves.
The dispersal is the point of the book's survival; the collection is long scattered, and the plates are what remain. Taschen's XXL reproduction of a hand-coloured copy restores the Thesaurus to circulation as both a scientific document and one of the most sumptuous printed works of the eighteenth century.
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