Coming soon,coffee table book on Himalayan wildlife

Ive gone to the Himalayas many times but have not seen animals like the brown bear.

Ive gone to the Himalayas many times but have not seen animals like the brown bear. This pictorial book is an opportunity to rediscover that disappearing wildlife of the Himalayas, said Dr Ashok Kothari,co-editor of a new coffee table book from the stable of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS). The book,titled Wildlife of the Himalayas and Terai Region,contains rare paintings and interesting articles from the British era about the Himalayan wildlife during that time.

Slated for a February release,the book contains colour paintings and lithographs of plants,animals and birds of the Himalayas from books by European naturalists such as John Gould,J Forbes Royle and JD Hooker. The paintings and lithographs which we have reproduced are 100 to 150 years old but their colours are still preserved. Lithography is an old technique of printing requiring tracing by hand which is now lost and is rarely seen, said Kothari,who is the honorary secretary of BNHS and has edited the book with Dr Boman Chhapgar.

The book,which took almost two years to put together and is the fifth in the series of coffee table books by BNHS,also contains text from rare and precious books published in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Those days,many Europeans would come to India to hunt. One such hunter-cum-naturalist was Alexendar Trilok,who wrote a book in 1860 about the wildlife of the Alpine Himalayas from which we have taken excerpts. There are also chapters from a 1909 book by Japanese monk Shraamana Kawaguchi,who lived in Tibet for three years and wrote about its wildlife, said Kothari.

Among the books main attractions are 10 double spread plates of Himalayan pheasants which are renowned for their bright colours. It also contains Himalayan landscapes by artists such as Charles Inglis and lithographs of the tiger,snow leopard,leopard cat,red panda which those in the know say are so real that they seem to leap out of the book. Before its February release,the book is being offered at a discounted rate as part of a pre-publication offer.

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Himalayas

Coming soon,coffee table book on Himalayan wildlife

Ive gone to the Himalayas many times but have not seen animals like the brown bear.

Ive gone to the Himalayas many times but have not seen animals like the brown bear.