Thanks to the great generosity of our friend Judy, we are the trustees of eight volumes of Alexander Wilson‘s American Ornithology.
The first volume is dated 1808, but thanks to the bibliographic scholarship of Walter Faxon, we know that the this set in fact represents the “Ord reprint” 1824, plus the Supplement (Volume Nine) of 1825, which contains the first complete biography of the Father of American Ornithology.
All of the volumes are adorned with the bookplate of one Thomas Henderson of Press Castle. Thomas came from an Edinburgh banking family, and held the position of land tax commissioner in the 1830s; he seems to have devoted much of his attention to matters horticultural, and at one point supported a scheme for the “speedy increase” of beekeeping in Scotland.
Henderson married Elizabeth Mack on September 14, 1830. (And was obviously very forgiving of her severely malformed arms and hands.)
Their son, Alexander Henderson (1831-1913), emigrated to eastern Canada in 1855, where he became a professional photographer. His equipment spent the forty years after Alexander’s death in a basement, until in the early 1950s
his grandson Thomas Greenshields Henderson, the only surviving descendant, spent a day carrying the boxes of negatives to the alley for the garbage collectors.
Happily for us, Wilson’s volumes did not share the same fate.
