UPDATE: The coloring book is now available to download, for your coloring pleasure!
My colleague Meredith Miller and I created this coloring book—A Beinecke Collection of Creatures—in honor of the reopening of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library after its closure for an 18-month renovation.
It’s an alphabet coloring book, and each letter is dedicated to an animal found somewhere within the Beinecke’s vast collections. The images selected cross geography, language, and time. From “A is for Antelope,” from a 1599 German volume entitled India Orientalis; to “Z is for Zebu,” from Master Woodbine’s Alphabet for All Good Children, London, 1850. And of course, being the product of a library, there’s a citation key in the back matching each animal to its printed or manuscript origin.
It was such a pleasure to conduct this safari through the Beinecke’s collections, searching out animals of every letter; some were more of a challenge than others, of course. Yes, we found an X! and a Q! It just so happens that there’s a bird called a xenops, and a fish called a queen triggerfish; I was able to find both amongst the 18th- and 19th-century illustrated natural history volumes. Now to get coloring…