Abbeville Edition
1985
The
Abbeville Edition was a collaboration of the National Audubon Society and
Abbeville Press in 1985 to commemorate Audubon's two-hundredth birthday.
They produced a full-sized facsimile edition of all 435 original plates
that Audubon had done for his Havell Edition volumes.
The original Havell copy that was used for reprinting belongs to the National Audubon Society, and is considered one of the finest copies in existence. The printing was done at Toppan Printing Company in Tokyo, Japan. Large-scale photographic transparencies were made of the original prints. Toppan then used up to thirteen colors for each of the 435 double elephant folio prints.
The paper for this edition is acid-free Mohawk Superfine and was made at the Mohawk Paper Company in New York. Each print bears the watermark "Audubon Society, Abbeville Press" in italic script. This work was limited in production to 350 copies. It was offered bound ($15,000 for the four volumes) or in portfolios of individual prints ($12,500).
A brief biography of John James Audubon can be found here.
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