Home > Categories > Paper > The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson

Click here to enlarge images

The Bedside Book of Birds by Graeme Gibson $35.00 Send to a friend

Graeme Gibson is one of Canada’s foremost contemporary writers and editors and is the acclaimed author of Five Legs, Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death. His most recent work is The Bedside Book of Birds: an Avian Miscellany (2005), hailed by Globe and Mail as "the most spectacular bird book of the year".

[Additional Information]

Goes well with...

Some of our Favorites...

Additional Information

A dazzling exploration of the history of the human–bird relationship. Gibson presents fiction, folklore, nonfiction, and poetry along with vivid visual depictions of birds in sculpture, drawings, and paintings (including the work above, by Nanavut artist K. Pootoogook). Birds have been worshiped as divine beings and hunted for food and feathers; they have inspired dreams and nightmares, fear and love. Gibson’s book captures this spectrum, highlighting excerpts from the Bible and the Quiché Mayan Book of Creation; myths retold by Aeschylus and Ovid; lyric poems by T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, and Robinson Jeffers; travelogues by Marco Polo and Bruce Chatwin; and paintings by F.O. Morris and John James Audubon. Gibson has played an active role in bringing North American and Cuban ornithologists together to provide training in field techniques to Cuban ornithologists. He is also chairman of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory in Ontario, Canada. Noted Canadian authors and conservation activists Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson have accepted a joint role as Honorary Presidents of BirdLife International’s Rare Bird Club. A couple for the past thirty-five years, they presently live in Toronto, Canada, but have also lived in Australia, France, the US and the UK. They are internationally recognized figures with extensive interests in and experience of wider nature conservation who are noted for their generosity in time and effort on behalf of other writers, social causes and conservation. They are both avid birders.

[Top of Page]