Around 1832, the Edinburgh printer William Home Lizars (1788-1859) began to plan a cheap series devoted to the breadth of zoological knowledge. He turned to his brother-in-law, Sir William Jardine to edit the proposed volumes. Sir William had the standing and contacts to successfully serve in the role but may otherwise had declined if not for his debts for which Lizars offered to pay £15 in royalties per 1,000 copies sold.
Taking inspiration from other multi-volume series such as Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, Lizars and Jardine planned for The Naturalist’s’ Library to be published in forty volumes issued quarterly over ten years. The books were to be of a uniform size and layout with as many colour plates included as possible without increasing the cost of each book. The series was also conveniently arranged so that subscribers could choose which books they wanted if they could not afford to buy the full set. Lizars also hoped to cut further costs by reusing coloured plates from other natural history works and by reprinting the descriptions of other authors, but Sir William refused and naturalists willing to commit to the project for a fee of £40 per book were sought. Jardine wrote eleven of the books in the set and a range of artists were employed to produce the plates, including Edward Lear.
The first volume of The Naturalist’s Library, covering hummingbirds, was published in March 1833 and the series continued until July 1843. It offered an affordable survey of animals from around the world that was immediately popular with Victorian audiences. Despite a planned print run of 1,000 copies, the London distributor Longmans estimated that between 1,500 and 5,000 copies were sold on average, with the most popular volumes selling up to 10,000.
The Naturalist’s Library was hugely successful and proved that cheap books on natural history could be published without sacrificing the quality of the text and its accompanying illustrations. The copyright was later purchased by Henry Bohn and reissued in an even cheaper edition in 1848.