Subject: Reed Field Guide
Date: Jun 18 10:53:31 1998
From: Scott Hoskin - bludog at earthlink.net


Michael Brown wrote:

>A colleague was cleaning out her closet and gave me "Bird Guide: Land Birds
East of the Rockies", by Chester A. Reed, New Revised Edition, Copyright
1951 by Doubleday. The original copyrights were 1906 and 1909. These early
dates pre-date Peterson, and I'm wondering what the significance of Reed is
in the history of bird identification guides.<

I too have this same book as well as Reed's "Western Bird Guide" (1913) and "Nature Study: Birds" (1910). According to Joseph Kastner's book "A World of Watchers" (a great book if you don't have it) Reed was pretty much the founder of field guides. Here is a passage from Kastner's book talking about the Bronx Bird club of which Roger Tory Peterson was a member (actually the club consisted of about 5 kids who went birding together):

"As which so many revolutionary bands, the club's equipment was scanty and inadequate. The members had to share a couple of pairs of opera glasses. Their field reference were pages torn from a New York bird book (Elon Eaton's "Birds of New York") that had been retrieved from a rubbish can, and Chester Reed's "Guide to the Land Birds East of the Rockies". This was their basic book-as it was for virtually every watcher of their generation everywhere in the country,
the book on which they all got started".

"Reed published his Guide in 1906 and died, six years later at thirty-six, before he could fully enjoy its huge success. It was, by far, the most widely used bird book of its time and, in relative terms, no guide has every really outdone it. Bird-book counters have lost track of how many millions of copies have been printed since the first one."

>From doing research on the web I found Reed's field guides were generally printed in two ways, a deluxe leather version and a standard cloth version. The Eastern Guide I have, which I found in an antique store in Arizona, is the leather version with a slip cover. (the original price was $1.95)

Hope this helps.

Scott Hoskin
bludog at earthlink.net
Seattle, WA
"If you're too busy to go birding, you're too busy"