Wednesday, July 31, 2019

20. This data is for the birds

A gorgeous book in my late mother's house—from 1904 and reprinted in 1921—is a Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music by Schuyler Matthews, complete with scales, beats, and notes. The author's charts are exquisite examples of information graphics before the term existed. The detail, immediately below, of the second spread down shows a "Diagram showing the pitch of twenty-one bird songs relatively with the keyboard." The author's knowledge, research and hand lettering (the least of it!) are humbling.






















































































(For July 30, 2019)

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