Old Butterfly books

[bugboy]

From 1952 comes this book, aimed at younger people

Most species get a mention and are pictured, either in colour plates or line drawings which a previous owner has started to colour in. They've not made a too bad hash of the job to be fair.

The author came up with an inventive theory as to why Skippers are called Skippers

[bugboy]

This book came out in 1973 when I was just 2, and although based upon South’s much reprinted book from the turn of the twentieth century it doesn’t bear much resemblance to it, owing as much, if not more to Frohawks work, including many reproductions of the latter’s images of early stages.

Every species recorded up to 1973 gets a mention, including all those one offs that had been accidentally brought over from the other side of the globe.
Along with Frohawks illustrations, the great butterfly artist Alexander Russworm provided the adults artwork, most interestingly with generous helpings of aberrations.

The book ends with what were at the time probably the most accurate distribution maps, many of which are interesting to compare with today’s maps. The Essex Skipper and Speckled Wood are very much restricted compared to today (as far as was known at the time) but you can see the HBF and PBF were already very much in decline.

[MikeOxon]

T.G.Howarth's book was my first 'serious' butterflies book. It took some tracking down, when I bought it in 1977, and inspired my early steps in butterfly photography. I assume that it was thought to be a selling point to mention 'South' in the title but it is really a completely different work.

Mike

[Neil Freeman]

This book came out in 1973 when I was just 2...

I was 12 then and well into butterflies and moths. I remember seeing this book for the fist time a few years later but it was out of my price range at the time and although my parents bought me a few books for Christmas/Birthday presents back then, I never did get this one. I spotted a copy on a certain well known online auction site about five years ago and finally treated myself to a copy.

A cracking book with great plates and, as you say, very interesting to compare the distribution maps to current ones.

Cheers,

Neil.

[bugboy]

It's certainly no pocket guide that's for sure eh Mike . If anything it could be seen as a forerunner of the Millennium Atlas.
That one has certainly stood the test of time, my copy probably came from the same place as yours Neil

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This is a trio of little booklets. I'm not sure if there were any more published, this is 1,2 & 3. Each one has a short entry of five random species. The first one's undated but the second and third are from 1929 & 1930 respectively so presumably the first is from 1928.

The main attraction for me are the illustrations, each species mentioned has a Frohawk plate depicting all the stages, finding the eggs in some of them can be tricky though, and you do need glasses!

[bugboy]

It seems right and proper to end this thread with a book (or rather a set of two books) which I never thought I’d be able to get my grubby mitts on without the aid of lottery windfall. However I managed to pick these up a couple of weeks ago for a price well within my financial reach . I’ve seen these exchange hands for 4 figure sums in the past! The price was probably helped by the somewhat worn condition, a large chunk of the spine on the first volume is missing, but apart from two loose pages, the insides are still in reasonably good nick.

I didn’t appreciate the size of them until I got them in my hands, they’re not small books at about 10” X 14”

Looking at the species plates though it’s clear the large size was essential to fully illustrate Frohawk’s lifework. The first volume starts with the Swallowtail, goes through the Pierids, Fritillaries, Aristocrats, the Monarch (which he referred to as the Black-veined Brown) and ends with four species of Browns.

As most of you will be aware even if you haven't read it, the text is very detailed:

Here's a long list of Clouded Yellow years and a note at the bottom about many of his earlier peers coming up with some weird and wonderful ideas as to their erratic occurrence. On the first page of the Mountain Ringlet there's a very strong assertion of it's occurrence in Ireland.

Some very vivid descriptions of cardui years. I like it when these old books mention places I still visit today, in this case Hockley where Heath Fritillary are the normal target for me now. (Epping Forest is mentioned numerous times in several of these old books and in this book Frohawk also states "In the past machaon undoubtedly existed commonly at Battersea and Tottenham Marshes, when these were rural country districts" oh if only... )

[bugboy]

Frohawks second volume starts of with the remaining Satyrids, goes through Lyceanidae and finishes off with the Duke of Burgundy and the Skippers. In this volume not every species gets a plate to itself.

At the end of both volumes there’s a couple of plates with black and white life drawings with the addition of an extra plate in this volume with some close up studies of a Large Blue caterpillar with an ant. The Marbled Skipper drawings are a reference to two which were captured in Surrey in 1923 with a short account of them in an appendix.

There’s a familiar sounding pattern of events in the first page of the Walls description and third broods in the UK isn’t a new thing either.

In the Large Heaths description Frohawk decides to state what we now know as the polydama race as the ‘true Large Heath’ with davus and scotica being races of it.

[Pete Eeles]

Thanks Buggy - it's so nice to read of the joy you're getting from this seminal work - it brought back memories from when I managed to get a mortgage to bag my own pair of volumes! A rare combination of information and art ... Frohawk was a genius in so many ways.

Cheers,

- Pete

[bugboy]

Thanks Pete, they really are something special aren't they, both his observations and his artwork have really stood the test of time, I've not been able to put them down since I got them!. Also I'm happy to say I didn't need to take out a second mortgage to get hold of them