{"id":10705,"date":"2017-01-23T07:44:50","date_gmt":"2017-01-23T14:44:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=10705"},"modified":"2017-01-23T07:44:50","modified_gmt":"2017-01-23T14:44:50","slug":"other-peoples-bird-books-jean-clemens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2017\/01\/23\/other-peoples-bird-books-jean-clemens\/","title":{"rendered":"Other People’s Bird Books: Jean Clemens"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Twain saw a lot of the outdoors over a long life that took him from the Mississippi to California to Connecticut. As I think back on what I’ve read of Twain, though, nature — Nature — doesn’t play much of a role at all. Landscape, even so dominant a feature as Huckleberry Finn’s river, never seems to be more than narrative convenience or metaphoric convention.<\/p>\n

I was surprised, then, to find a notable selection of natural history titles among the books Twain donated to the library in Redding<\/a>, Connecticut, in the last years of his life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It turns out that most had been gifts to his daughter Jean.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

On her early death in 1909, Jean Clemens’s father wrote<\/a> that<\/p>\n

She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds, beasts, and everything — even snakes — an inheritance from me. She knew all the birds; she was high up in that lore.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And she learned her bird lore the way most people did in the first years of the twentieth century: from the works of Frank Michler Chapman. Clemens owned both his\u00a0Warblers<\/em>, in a 1907 edition, and a 1903 printing of his\u00a0Handbook<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Clemens also owned<\/a> another standard of the\u00a0day, now forgotten, Oliver Davie’s popular oology:<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

More cutting edge: Dugmore’s\u00a0Nature and the Camera<\/em><\/a>, an early introduction to photographing birds, other animals, and natural features.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/p>\n

Clemens received this book as a gift from her father in 1903, six years before her death. Does anyone know whether she ever put its precepts into practice?<\/p>\n

Herbert K. Job was another early “camera-hunter,” still far better known today than Dugmore ever was. Samuel Clemens gave a copy of Job’s Wild Wings\u00a0<\/em>to his daughter in November 1904.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

All I know about Jean Clemens’s books is what was written in the NYT<\/a> some time ago. But that is quite enough to suggest that her interests in bird study ran deep, and it seems likely that a careful examination of the physical books themselves would turn up notes and other signs of use to offer some insight into the birding life of a young woman at the turn of the last century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Twain saw a lot of the outdoors over a long life that took him from the Mississippi to California to Connecticut. As I think back on what I’ve read of Twain, though, nature — Nature — doesn’t play much of a role at all. Landscape, even so dominant a feature as Huckleberry Finn’s river, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Other People’s Bird Books: Jean Clemens”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10705"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10714,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10705\/revisions\/10714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}