In addition to the material listed above, the Collection includes a number of separately published prospectuses and announcements for various Gould works, a few letters, and some of Gould's scientific articles. The chief glory of the Gould holdings is known as the "Gould drawings." These take many forms and amount to over 2,000 rough sketches, heavily annotated drawings, water-colors (both rough and highly finished), tissue drawings and tracings, and twelve lithographic stones. Over 1,000 of the drawings have been identified with their published versions; many are certainly unpublished.
One of the problems posed by John Gould's publications is that of his own contribution to the illustrations. Gould was not a trained artist; he was trained as a gardener and a taxidermist, yet he certainly had an artist's eye. He had a number of trained artists working for him. His own contribution has been described on the one hand as little more than managerial and on the other as that of the native genius whose quick pencil inspired and enlivened the more technically perfect work of the others. Those closest to him in time have suggested that he made the original rough sketches which were then perfected and transferred to stone and color by others under his constant direction. The "Gould drawings" make it clear that the production of a finished lithograph went through many stages and that changes were made in response to directions from Gould. Without a good deal of further study, however, it is not possible to say exactly what these stages were or who performed which operation. What, for example, is the function of the tracings? At least one pair is labeled"Tracing I" and "Tracing 2" and neither appears to be a "litho transfer," i.e., the medium through which the image was transferred from paper to the lithographic stone. Some of the questions may be answered by study of the "Gould drawings." Many of them are annotated, some heavily. Some are signed. Over 150 separate figures appear in at least two versions preliminary to the final lithograph, some in as many as five.
In putting together this small exhibit, just thirty-seven pieces out of well over two thousand, an attempt has been made to show the increasing excellence of the Gould work over fifty years of publishing, the beauty and variety of the animals he brought into the homes of his readers, and the work of his different artists. Above all, however, the purpose has been to show the types of evidence available in the collection for the study and possible solution of the problem of how these works and, by extension, others of the period were actually produced.