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Hawaiian Fishes.
Honolulu: James Steiner, the Island Curio Company [ca. 1905]. Oblong 16mo (4.875” x 6.875”), blue cloth spine and pebbled blue paper over boards, gilt title and decorative beach design on front cover. 12 chromolithographs on as many accordion-folded leaves, [1] p. of printed text at back paste-down. CONDITION: Very good, covers somewhat worn, additional crease and wear to initial accordion folds. All colors bright and lithographs fine. A selection of twelve vivid plates of Hawaiian fishes based on those in David Starr Jordan’s authoritative study, The Aquatic Resources of the Hawaiian Islands. Published by the Honolulu-based Island Curio Company, one of “very, very few curio businesses in the islands” during the early 20th-century (Steiner), this is one of the few Island Curio Co. publications printed in Germany that are not in postcard form. This appealing souvenir book, published immediately after the Honolulu Aquarium (now the Waikiki Aquarium) was founded in 1904, reproduces illustrations made by A. H. Baldwin, Charles Bradford Hudson (who was actually in Honolulu in 1901, sketching local fish), and the Japanese painter Kako Morita. According to the promotional information on the rear paste-down, the Aquarium typically displayed “600 to 1000 fishes of approximately 200 varieties. Those shown in the pictures published herewith are only a few of the most striking specimens.” These illustrations include the “Humuhumu,” the state fish of Hawaii, alongside several other fish native to Hawaii’s waters. Unlike the scientific captions accompanying The Aquatic Resources’ illustrations, this collection presents the fish with their Hawaiian names, with occasional comments on the peculiarity of fish in Hawaii. The promotional material contends that “[l]anguage cannot do this subject [Hawaii’s fish] justice. No words can accurately portray what one has seen here. The fish are odd in shape and have all the hues of the rainbow. The tints are laid on as if with a brush and yet no painter could imitate them. No visitor to Honolulu should fail to see the Aquarium.” The promotion further notes that the Aquarium “is visited by about 50,000 persons annually” who are each charged “[a]n admission fee of 25 cents’’ to assist with “operating, enlarging and improving the exhibit.” The fish of the Aquarium, once pictured by the Island Curio Co., “became mass commodities in a visual economy of images that linked Hawai‘i with America and Europe” (“Extended Personhood”). OCLC records just three copies, at the Smithsonian, Brigham Young University of Hawaii, and Harvard. REFERENCES: Steiner, Ernest. “Oral History Interview” (1985) at ScholarSpace, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa online; Davis, Lynn Ann. “Photographically Illustrated Books about Hawai‘i, 1854-1945,” The Hawaiian Journal of History, vol. 35 (2001); “Extended Personhood—An Exhibition of Postcards from Hawai‘i between 1898–1920” (2016), University of Hawai‘i at Manoa online.
Item #8220
Price: $600.00
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