Some damage to the jacket.
Popular Poultry Breeds is a meticulously researched refrence work that examines forty of the most popular poultry breeds, and all their variants. THe book is dividied into thirty-five chapters, each of which covers a single breed or a group of related breeds.
Most enthusiasts who keep their old breeds are interested in the history of their birds and for this reason much of the content of the book is hisotrical in nature. Every breed has its own fascinating hisotry and in many cases this has been influenced by events totally unrelated to poultry farming. Moreover, in the case of some breeds vital pieces of information about their development still remain a mystery. For example, a great deal of detailed information is available concerning how the Araucanas developed into three standard types after 1880, but little has yet been discovered about the circumstances surrounding the transportation of the birds across the Pacific Ocean by the ancient Polynesians.
The authors has drawn the information for this remarkable book from many arouces, including rare, and difficult to find, pamphlets and magazines, some over 150 years old. Many of these sources, although not as expensive to acquire as the classic Victorian poultry books written by Lewis Wright and others, sometimes contain key facts that fill in the gaps and provide us with a much more complete history of particular breeds.
Each chapter is beautifully illustrated both with colour photographs of excellent specimens of the breeds as they exist now, and with reproductions of old prints. The artists Cornelis van FInk, J.W. Ludlow, and others, depicted idealized versions of the breeds in their paintings and p rints, and these became templates that breeds tried to make a living reality. it is interesting to compare the modern photographs with the old prints and to see how successful enthusiasts have been in reproducing breeds, that were originally 'created', in part at least, as a result of artistic licence.
Hardback.