Perry’s Arcana, 1810–1811
An architect by training, George Perry, Jr. from England was a self-proclaimed naturalist, publishing two largely graphical collections of the natural world—the Conchology, a large book that depicts shells of various species, and the Arcana, one of the first serial magazines of natural history. Each month, subscribers to the Arcana would receive a “little paper package” of loose-leaf pages—one to four illustrations of animal (and occasionally plant) species with a few pages of text describing each one, says Paul Callomon, collections manager at The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which recently acquired this rare, complete set of the collection.
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