Order of the British Empire
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organisations, public service outside the civil service. It was established on 4 June 1917 by King George V and comprises five classes across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two of which make the recipient either a knight if male or dame if female. There is the related British Empire Medal, whose recipients are affiliated with, but not members of, the order. Recommendations for appointments to the Order of the British Empire were made on the nomination of the United Kingdom, the self-governing Dominions of the Empire and the Viceroy of India. Nominations continue today from Commonwealth countries that participate in recommending British honours. Most Commonwealth countries ceased recommendations for appointments to the Order of the British Empire when they created their own honours; the five classes of appointment to the Order are, in descending order of precedence: Knight Grand Cross or Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Knight Commander or Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire The senior two ranks of Knight or Dame Grand Cross, Knight or Dame Commander, entitle their members to use the title of Sir for men and Dame for women before their forename.
Most members are citizens of the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth realms that use the Imperial system of honours and awards. Honorary knighthoods are appointed to citizens of nations where the Queen is not head of state, may permit use of post-nominal letters but not the title of Sir or Dame. Honorary appointees are, referred to as Sir or Dame – Bob Geldof, for example. Honorary appointees who become a citizen of a Commonwealth realm can convert their appointment from honorary to substantive enjoy all privileges of membership of the order, including use of the title of Sir and Dame for the senior two ranks of the Order. An example is Irish broadcaster Terry Wogan, appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order in 2005, on successful application for British citizenship, held alongside his Irish citizenship, was made a substantive member and subsequently styled as Sir Terry Wogan. King George V founded the Order to fill gaps in the British honours system: The Orders of the Garter, of St Patrick honoured royals, peers and eminent military commanders.
In particular, King George V wished to create an Order to honour many thousands of those who had served in a variety of non-combatant roles during the First World War. When first established, the Order had only one division. However, in 1918, soon after its foundation, it was formally divided into Military and Civil Divisions; the Order's motto is For the Empire. At the foundation of the Order, the'Medal of the Order of the British Empire' was instituted, to serve as a lower award granting recipients affiliation but not membership. In 1922, this was renamed the'British Empire Medal', it stopped being awarded by the United Kingdom as part of the 1993 reforms to the honours system, but was again awarded beginning in 2012, starting with 293 BEMs awarded for Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee. In addition, the BEM is awarded by some other Commonwealth nations. In 2004, a report entitled "A Matter of Honour: Reforming Our Honours System" by a Commons committee recommended to phase out the Order of the British Empire, as its title was "now considered to be unacceptable, being thought to embody values that are no longer shared by many of the country's population".
The British monarch is Sovereign of the Order, appoints all other members of the Order. The next most senior member is the Grand Master, of whom there have been three: Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales; the Order is limited to 300 Knights and Dames Grand Cross, 845 Knights and Dames Commander, 8,960 Commanders. There are no limits applied to the total number of members of the fourth and fifth classes, but no more than 858 Officers and 1,464 Members may be appointed per year. Foreign appointees, as honorary members, do not contribute to the numbers restricted to the Order as full members do. Although the Order of the British Empire has by far the highest number of members of the British Orders of Chivalry, with over 100,000 living members worldwide, there are fewer appointments to knighthoods than in other orders. Though men can be knighted separately from an order of chivalry, women cannot, so the rank of Knight/Dame Commander of the Order is the lowest rank of damehood, second-lowest of knighthood.
Because of this, an appointment as Dame Commander is made in circumstances in which a man would be created a Knight Bachelor. For example, by convention, female judges of the High Court of Justice are created Dames Commander after appointment, while male judges
Historical ecology
Historical ecology is a research program that focuses on the interactions between humans and their environment over long-term periods of time over the course of centuries. In order to carry out this work, historical ecologists synthesize long-series data collected by practitioners in diverse fields. Rather than concentrating on one specific event, historical ecology aims to study and understand this interaction across both time and space in order to gain a full understanding of its cumulative effects. Through this interplay, humans adapt to and shape the environment, continuously contributing to landscape transformation. Historical ecologists recognize that humans have had world-wide influences, impact landscape in dissimilar ways which increase or decrease species diversity, that a holistic perspective is critical to be able to understand that system. Piecing together landscapes requires a sometimes difficult union between natural and social sciences, close attention to geographic and temporal scales, a knowledge of the range of human ecological complexity, the presentation of findings in a way, useful to researchers in many fields.
Those tasks require theory and methods drawn from geography, ecology, sociology and other disciplines. Common methods include historical research, climatological reconstructions and animal surveys, archaeological excavations, ethnographic interviews, landscape reconstructions; the discipline has several sites of origins by researchers who shared a common interest in the problem of ecology and history, but with a diversity of approaches. Edward Smith Deevey, Jr. used the term in the 1960s to describe a methodology, in long development. Deevey wished to bring together the practices of "general ecology", studied in an experimental laboratory, with a "historical ecology" which relied on evidence collected through fieldwork. For example, Deevey used radiocarbon dating to reconcile biologists’ successions of plants and animals with the sequences of material culture and sites discovered by archaeologists. In the 1980s, members of the history department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock organized a lecture series entitled "Historical Ecology: Essays on Environment and Social Change" The authors noted the public’s concerns with pollution and dwindling natural resources, they began a dialogue between researchers with specialties which spanned the social sciences.
The papers highlighted the importance of understanding social and political structures, personal identities, perceptions of nature, the multiplicity of solutions for environmental problems. The emergence of historical ecology as a coherent discipline was driven by a number of long-term research projects in historical ecology of tropical and arctic environments: E. S. Deevey's Historical Ecology of the Maya Project was carried out by archaeologists and biologists who combined data from lake sediments, settlement patterns, material from excavations in the central Petén District of Guatemala to refute the hypotheses that a collapse of Mayan urban areas was instigated by faltering food production. Carole L. Crumley's Burgundian Landscape Project is carried out by a multidisciplinary research team aimed at identifying the multiple factors which have contributed to the long-term durability of the agricultural economy of Burgundy, France. Thomas H. McGovern's Inuit-Norse Project uses archaeology, environmental reconstruction, textual analysis to examine the changing ecology of Nordic colonizers and indigenous peoples in Greenland, Iceland and Shetland.
In recent years the approaches to historical ecology have been expanded to include coastal and marine environments: Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary Project examines Massachusetts, USA cod fishing in the 17th through 19th centuries through historical records. Florida Keys Coral Reef Eco-region Project researchers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography are examining archival records including natural history descriptions and charts, family and personal papers, state and colonial records in order to understand the impact of over-fishing and habitat loss in the Florida Keys, USA which contains the third largest coral reef in the world. Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Historical Ecology seeks to collect relevant historical data on fishing and trade of the furs of aquatic animals in order form a baseline for environmental restorations of the California, USA coast. Historical ecology is interdisciplinary in principle. Western scholars have known since the time of Plato that the history of environmental changes cannot be separated from human history.
Several ideas have been used to describe human interaction with the environment, the first of, the concept of the Great Chain of Being, or inherent design in nature. In this, all forms of life are ordered, with Humanity as the highest being, due to its knowledge and ability to modify nature; this lends to the concept of another nature, a manmade nature, which involves design or modification by humans, as opposed to design inherent in nature. Interest in environmental transformation continued to increase in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries, resulting in a series of new intellectual approaches. One of these approaches was environmental determinism, developed by geographer Friedrich Ratzel; this view held that it is not social conditions, but environmental conditions, which determine the culture of a population. Ratzsel viewed humans as restricted by nature, for their behaviors are limited to and defined by their environment. A approach was the historical
Botany
Botany called plant science, plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist; the term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek word βοτάνη meaning "pasture", "grass", or "fodder". Traditionally, botany has included the study of fungi and algae by mycologists and phycologists with the study of these three groups of organisms remaining within the sphere of interest of the International Botanical Congress. Nowadays, botanists study 410,000 species of land plants of which some 391,000 species are vascular plants, 20,000 are bryophytes. Botany originated in prehistory as herbalism with the efforts of early humans to identify – and cultivate – edible and poisonous plants, making it one of the oldest branches of science. Medieval physic gardens attached to monasteries, contained plants of medical importance, they were forerunners of the first botanical gardens attached to universities, founded from the 1540s onwards.
One of the earliest was the Padua botanical garden. These gardens facilitated the academic study of plants. Efforts to catalogue and describe their collections were the beginnings of plant taxonomy, led in 1753 to the binomial system of Carl Linnaeus that remains in use to this day. In the 19th and 20th centuries, new techniques were developed for the study of plants, including methods of optical microscopy and live cell imaging, electron microscopy, analysis of chromosome number, plant chemistry and the structure and function of enzymes and other proteins. In the last two decades of the 20th century, botanists exploited the techniques of molecular genetic analysis, including genomics and proteomics and DNA sequences to classify plants more accurately. Modern botany is a broad, multidisciplinary subject with inputs from most other areas of science and technology. Research topics include the study of plant structure and differentiation, reproduction and primary metabolism, chemical products, diseases, evolutionary relationships and plant taxonomy.
Dominant themes in 21st century plant science are molecular genetics and epigenetics, which are the mechanisms and control of gene expression during differentiation of plant cells and tissues. Botanical research has diverse applications in providing staple foods, materials such as timber, rubber and drugs, in modern horticulture and forestry, plant propagation and genetic modification, in the synthesis of chemicals and raw materials for construction and energy production, in environmental management, the maintenance of biodiversity. Botany originated as the study and use of plants for their medicinal properties. Many records of the Holocene period date early botanical knowledge as far back as 10,000 years ago; this early unrecorded knowledge of plants was discovered in ancient sites of human occupation within Tennessee, which make up much of the Cherokee land today. The early recorded history of botany includes many ancient writings and plant classifications. Examples of early botanical works have been found in ancient texts from India dating back to before 1100 BC, in archaic Avestan writings, in works from China before it was unified in 221 BC.
Modern botany traces its roots back to Ancient Greece to Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle who invented and described many of its principles and is regarded in the scientific community as the "Father of Botany". His major works, Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, constitute the most important contributions to botanical science until the Middle Ages seventeen centuries later. Another work from Ancient Greece that made an early impact on botany is De Materia Medica, a five-volume encyclopedia about herbal medicine written in the middle of the first century by Greek physician and pharmacologist Pedanius Dioscorides. De Materia Medica was read for more than 1,500 years. Important contributions from the medieval Muslim world include Ibn Wahshiyya's Nabatean Agriculture, Abū Ḥanīfa Dīnawarī's the Book of Plants, Ibn Bassal's The Classification of Soils. In the early 13th century, Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, Ibn al-Baitar wrote on botany in a systematic and scientific manner. In the mid-16th century, "botanical gardens" were founded in a number of Italian universities – the Padua botanical garden in 1545 is considered to be the first, still in its original location.
These gardens continued the practical value of earlier "physic gardens" associated with monasteries, in which plants were cultivated for medical use. They supported the growth of botany as an academic subject. Lectures were given about the plants grown in the gardens and their medical uses demonstrated. Botanical gardens came much to northern Europe. Throughout this period, botany remained subordinate to medicine. German physician Leonhart Fuchs was one of "the three German fathers of botany", along with theologian Otto Brunfels and physician Hieronymus Bock. Fuchs and Brunfels broke away from the tradition of copying earlier works to make original observations of their own. Bock created his own system of plant classification. Physician Valerius Cordus authored a botanically and pharmacologically important herbal Historia Plantarum in 1544 and a pharmacopoeia of lasting importance, the Dispensatorium
Woodland Trust
The Woodland Trust is the largest woodland conservation charity in the United Kingdom concerned with the creation and restoration of native woodland heritage. It has over 500,000 supporters and has planted over 41 million trees since 1972; the Woodland Trust has three key aims: i) to protect ancient woodland, rare and irreplaceable, ii) the restoration of damaged ancient woodland, iii) plant native trees and woods with the aim of creating resilient landscapes for people and wildlife. The Woodland Trust maintains ownership of over 1,000 sites covering over 22,500 hectares, it ensures public access to its woods. The charity was founded in Devon, England in 1972 by retired farmer and agricultural machinery dealer Kenneth Watkins. By 1977 it had twenty two woods in six counties. In 1978 it relocated to Grantham in Lincolnshire and announced an expansion of its activities across the UK, it has supported the National Tree Week scheme, which takes place in late November and is run by The Tree Council.
From 2005 to 2008 it co-operated with the BBC for their Springwatch programme and the BBC's Breathing Places series of events held at woods. It continues to work with Springwatch and Autumnwatch most in 2015 as part of the Big Spring Watch, which encouraged viewers to record the signs of nature through the Trust's Nature's Calendar project, it acquired Balmacaan Wood next to Loch Ness in 1984. It now has over 80 woods in Scotland, covering 21,000 acres. In Wales, it acquired the 94 acres Coed Lletywalter in Snowdonia National Park in 1980, it now has over 100 woods in Wales. It started in Northern Ireland in 1996 when it received a grant from the Millennium Commission to set up over 50 community woods; the scheme was called Woods on Your Doorstep. Its first employee and Director, John James, came from Lincolnshire and was living in Nottingham at the time, it had a small office on Westgate. John James was Chief Executive from 1992–97, Michael Townsend from 1997-2004. Sue Holden from 2004-2014; the current CEO is Beccy Speight.
A new eco-friendly headquarters, adjacent to the former HQ, was completed in 2010 at a cost of GB£5.1million. The new headquarters have been designed by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios as Architect and Atelier One as Structural Engineer, incorporates light shelves to distribute natural daylight around the 200 workstations, concrete panels to absorb daytime heat, to provide the thermal mass that the lightweight wooden structure would otherwise lack, it is estimated that compared to a concrete framed construction, the timber structure saved the equivalent in carbon production as nine years of the building's operation. The Woodland Trust's Head Office is located in Grantham in South Kesteven, south Lincolnshire, with regional offices across the UK, it employs around 300 people at its Grantham headquarters. Its current president is Clive Anderson since 2003. In 2016 Barbara Young, Baroness Young of Old Scone became the charity's Chair; the Woodland Trust receives funding from a wide range of sources including membership, legacies and appeals, corporate supporters and charitable trusts including lottery funding, other organisations and landfill tax.
The Woodland Trust uses its experience and authority in conservation to influence others who are in a position to improve the future of native woodland. This includes government, other landowners, like-minded organisations, it campaigns to protect and save ancient woodland from destructive development. Its projects include the Nature Detectives youth programme, a project for schools learning about the seasonal effect on woodlands - phenology - and the Ancient Tree Hunt campaign, it looks after groups of woods covering 190 square kilometres. Nearly 350 of its sites contain ancient woodland of which 70 per cent is semi-natural ancient woodland – land, under tree cover since at least 1600, it manages over 110 Sites of Special Scientific Interest. There are over 600 ancient woods under threat across the UK, it has created new woodlands: over 32 km2 have been created, including 250 new community woods in England and Northern Ireland. Its largest current projects include the 41.7 km2 Glen Finglas Estate in the Trossachs and the Heartwood Forest near St Albans, England, which will cover 347 ha.
It owns 20 sites covering 4.3 km2 in the National Forest and has twelve sites in Community Forests in England. The Woodland Trust provides free trees to communities or places of education in order to facilitate the creation of new woodland; the Woodland Trust's Woods on Your Doorstep project created 250 "Millennium woods" to celebrate the millennium 2000/2001. The Trust ran the Jubilee Woods project, which aimed to plant 6 million trees and create 60 commemorative'Diamond' woods across the UK as part of Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012; the largest of these and managed by the Trust itself, is the Flagship Diamond Wood in Leicestershire. Situated within the National Forest this will be planted with 300,000 trees; the Ancient Tree Inventory is a project run by the Woodland Trust in partnership with the Tree Register of the British Isles and the Ancient Tree Forum. The aim is to record ancient and notable trees in the United Kingdom. To date over 170,000 trees have been recorded.
The database allows a better understanding of the number and spread of ancient trees in the UK. The records can be viewed through the tree search on the Ancient Tree Inventory website. Anyone can add to the database by recording a tree, records are verified by a team of volunteers; this is a project commemorating the First World War which involved tree
Norwich School (independent school)
Norwich School is a selective English independent day school in the close of Norwich Cathedral, Norwich. Among the oldest schools in the United Kingdom, it has a traceable history to 1096 as an episcopal grammar school established by Herbert de Losinga, first Bishop of Norwich. In the 16th century the school came under the control of the city of Norwich and moved to Blackfriars' Hall following a successful petition to Henry VIII; the school was refounded in 1547 in a royal charter granted by Edward VI and moved to its current site beside the cathedral in 1551. In the 19th century it became independent of the city and its classical curriculum was broadened in response to the declining demand for classical education following the Industrial Revolution. Early statutes declared the school was to instruct 90 sons of Norwich citizens, though it has since grown to a total enrolment of 1,020 pupils. For most of its history it was a boys' school, before becoming co-educational in the sixth form in 1994 and in every year group in 2010.
The school is divided into the Senior School, which has around 850 pupils aged from 12 to 18 across eight houses, the Lower School, established in 1946 and has around 250 pupils aged from 4 to 11. The school educates the choristers of the cathedral, with which the school has a close relationship and, used for morning assemblies and events throughout the academic year. In league tables of British schools it is ranked first in Norfolk and Suffolk and amongst the highest in the United Kingdom. Former pupils are referred to as Old ONs; the school has maintained a strong academic tradition and has educated a number of notable figures including Lord Nelson, Sir Edward Coke and 17 Fellows of the Royal Society among many others. Several members of the Norwich School of painters, the first provincial art movement in England, were educated at the school and the movement's founder, John Crome taught at the school, it is a founding member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, a member of the Choir Schools' Association and has a historical connection with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, one of the Livery Companies of the City of London.
Norwich School traces its origins to the founding of an episcopal grammar school in 1096 by Herbert de Losinga, first Bishop of Norwich. The continuity of the current Norwich School with the 1096 school would make it one of the oldest surviving schools in the United Kingdom; the newly established school occupied a site on "Holmstrete" in the parish of St Matthew between the close of Norwich Cathedral and the River Wensum. Until the English Reformation the bishop would appoint the headteacher, though on several occasions this role had been fulfilled by the Archbishop of Canterbury; the earliest known headteacher is Vincent of Scarning, mentioned in 1240 regarding a financial dispute with a school in Rudham. In 1538, the school was separated from its cathedral foundation and placed under the control of the mayor and commonalty of the city of Norwich following a successful petition to Henry VIII for the possession of Blackfriars' Hall, a Dominican friary, surrendered to the Crown in the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
Two prominent citizens of the city, Augustine Steward and Edward Rede, after consulting Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, promised on the city's behalf "to fynd a perpetual free-schole therein for the good erudicion and education of yought in lernyng and vertue". Following repairs, the school moved to the former friary in 1541, occupying part of the south-west cloister, where it educated 20 boys under a master and a sub-master; the school was refounded as King Edward VI Grammar School in a royal charter granted by Edward VI dated 7 May 1547. Issued four months into the king's accession, the charter expressly implemented an arrangement designed by Henry VIII and was confirmed by Edward Seymour, Lord Protector. Unusually for a cathedral city Norwich did not receive a cathedral school following the Reformation, but an endowed city grammar school. Norwich Cathedral was the first of the eight cathedral priories to surrender to the Crown, formally being re-established as a secular cathedral with a dean and chapter on 2 May 1538.
Negotiations over the refoundation charter were between the city, rather than the cathedral, the Crown. Known as the Great Hospital Charter, it granted the city possession of St Giles' hospital called the Great Hospital, merged the school with it in the hope of achieving an integrated system of education and poor relief; these plans were never realised, however, as the Great Hospital was stripped for building materials and sacked during Kett's Rebellion in 1549. The school temporarily occupied a building north-west of the cathedral. In 1550 the city purchased the former chantry chapel and college of St John the Evangelist beside the cathedral for the use of the grammar school out of the £200 each year at their disposal in a licence in mortmain to purchase and add to the revenues of the Great Hospital. Founded in 1316 by John Salmon, Bishop of Norwich, the chapel, in addition to its role as a chantry dedicated to the souls of Salmon's parents and the predecessors and successors of the Bishops of Norwich had been used as a charnel house and contained the Wodehouse chantry, founded by Henry V at the request of John Wodehous, a veteran of the Battle of Agincourt.
The school moved to the site in the summer of 1551, where it has remained since. The chapel was used as the main schoolroom while the other buildings were used to provide a library and accommodation for the master and boarding pupils; the arrangement continued until the 19th century, and
J. M. Dent
Joseph Malaby Dent was a British book publisher who produced the Everyman's Library series. Dent was born in Darlington in. After a short and unsuccessful stint as an apprentice printer he took up bookbinding. At the age of fifteen he gave a talk on James Boswell's Life of Johnson which would be the first book printed in the Everyman's Library. Around 1896 he began publishing high-quality limited editions of literary classics under the Temple Classics imprint. In 1888 he founded the publishing firm of Company. Between 1889 and 1894 Dent published the works of Charles Lamb, Oliver Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Chaucer and like authors. Printed in small runs on handmade paper, these early editions enjoyed modest commercial success. Dent established the successful Temple Shakespeare series in 1894. In 1904, Dent began to plan Everyman's Library, a series of one thousand classics to be published in an attractive format and sold at one shilling. To meet demand, Dent built the Temple Press in Letchworth founded as the first Garden City.
The publication of the Everyman Library began in 1906 and 152 titles were issued by the end of the first year. However, it was soon confronted by a double blow: the Copyright Act 1911 which extended protection to fifty years after the author's death thus reducing the availability of Victorian texts, World War I which brought with it inflation and shortages of supplies. In A Sinking Island, Hugh Kenner wrote: "Destiny beckoned J. M. Dent toward the kingdom of books, without learning to spell he became an influential bookman, he was small, tight-fisted, apt to weep under pressure, a performance that could disconcert authors and employees. When his temper had risen like a flame he'd scream, his paroxysms were famous. For editing the Library he paid Ernest Rhys three guineas a volume—what senior office-boys might earn in two weeks. Dent's ungovernable passion was for bringing Books to the People, he remembered. Yes, you could make the world better, he thought cheap books might prevent wars."Although not a new idea, what set Everyman's apart from earlier series was its scope.
He was able to build a new offices in Covent Garden with the profits. Despite having an impressive range of literature, Dent prevented classics of dubious morals, such as Moll Flanders, from being printed; the First World War slowed the production of books and Dent did not live to see the one thousand volume mark reached in 1956. Among the impressive volumes that came from Dent was The Pilgrim's Regress, the spiritual autobiography of C. S. Lewis, published in 1933. J. M. Dent, his sons Hugh and Jack, Jack's son F. J. Martin Dent, constituted the board of directors in the 1920s. Hugh Dent functioned as an editor for Everyman's Library. After J. M. Dent's death, W. G. Taylor, the secretary of the firm since 1916, joined the board. Hugh R. Dent served as the chairman from 1926 to 1938, followed by Taylor from 1938 to 1963. Taylor was managing director from 1934 to 1955. F. J. Martin Dent followed Taylor as managing chairman. Weidenfeld & Nicolson purchased J. M. Dent & Sons in January 1988, it now forms an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group.
The registered companies of J. M. Dent & Sons and Everyman's Library were retained by the Dent family and are now an investment company, Malaby Holdings Ltd, Malaby Martin Ltd, a niche development company. A new sister company Malaby Biogas Ltd was created in 2009 as a pioneering renewable energy and sustainable development business. J. M. and Hugh R. Dent, The House of Dent 1888-1938: being the memoirs of J. M. Dent with additional chapters covering the last 16 years by Hugh R Dent, London: J. M. Dent, 1938. Ernest Rhys, Everyman Remembers, London: J. M. Dent and Sons Limited, 1931. Works by or about J. M. Dent in libraries Works published by Dent, at Internet Archive J. M. Dent & Sons Records, 1834-1986, unc.edu. "Archival material held in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill"
New Naturalist
The New Naturalist Library is a series of books published by Collins in the United Kingdom, on a variety of natural history topics relevant to the British Isles. The aim of the series at the start was: "To interest the general reader in the wild life of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists." An editors' preface to a 1952 monograph says: "An object of the New Naturalist series is the recognition of the many-sidedness of British natural history, the encouragement of unusual and original developments of its forgotten or neglected facets."The first volume to appear was E. B. Ford's Butterflies in 1945; the authors of this series are eminent experts professional scientists. This gives the series authority, many are or have been authoritative introductory textbooks on a subject for some years; the books are written in scientific style, but are intended to be readable by the non-specialist, are an early example of popular science in the media. The books of the series have had considerable influence on many students who became professional biologists, such as W.
D. Hamilton and Mike Majerus; the latter was inspired by Ford's Butterflies and Moths, has since added two volumes of his own to the series. A parallel series known as the New Naturalist Monograph Library was published, its aim was to cover "in greater detail... a single species or group of species". There have been no additions to the Monograph Library since 1971. Volume 82 of the main series, The New Naturalists, described the series to date, with authors' biographies and a guide to collecting the books; the original Editorial Board consisted of Julian Huxley, James Fisher, Dudley Stamp, John Gilmour and Eric Hosking. Until 1985, the characteristic dust jacket illustrations were by Rosemary and Clifford Ellis. Being a numbered series, with a low print run for some volumes, the books are collectable. Second-hand copies of the rarer volumes, in good condition, can command high prices; the 100th volume, Woodlands by Oliver Rackham was published in 2006. Woodlands was published in 2006 as a "leatherbound" edition, limited to 100 copies.
In fact it was fake leather. The second "leatherbound" New Naturalist - Dragonflies by Philip Corbet and Stephen Brooks - was published in 2008; the leather edition of Dragonflies was limited to 400 copies, subsequently limited to 303, to 250. According to the New Naturalist website only 217 were sold and the remaining unsold stock is being kept secure at HarperCollins's offices. HarperCollins continue to produce limited numbers of "leatherbound" editions of all volumes published since Dragonflies, but only from Islands was real leather used. All recent volumes have only 50 leatherbound copies; the series won the 2007 British Book Design and Production Award for "brand or series identity", in 2008 the official website was launched, with features including the latest news, a members only area with access to exclusive content and downloads, a forum. In around 1990, Bloomsbury produced a series of facsimile editions, as hardbacks with new dustjacket designs, with all plates in black and white, including those which were in colour.
Category:New Naturalist writers Official website for the series Titles in print List of main series with jacket illustrations Official'New Naturalists' desktop wallpaper, featuring a collage of Giilmor's artwork for the series List of monographs with jacket illustrations
