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art book cologne, founded by Bernd Detsch in 1997, is a wholesale company and specializes in buying and selling high quality publications in art, art theory, architecture, design, photography, illustrated cultural history and all related subjects internationally. Our team includes specialists in art, culture, music, book trade and media but in spite of our diversity we have one common ground: the enthusiasm for unique art books.
We purchase remaining stocks from museums, publishers and art institutions. We sell these remainders to bookstores, museum shops, and art dealers all over the world.
Taryn Simon – Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies
| Publisher | Hatje Cantz |
| Year | 2016 |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Language | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-7757-4092-0 |
| Pages | 606 |
| Weight | 2000 g |
| More | |
| Contributors | Daniel Baumann, Nico Baumbach |
| Article ID | art-28993 |
In 1936, an American ornithologist named James Bond published the definitive taxonomy Birds of the West Indies. Ian Fleming, an active bird-watcher living in Jamaica, appropriated the name for his novel’s lead character. He found it “flat and colourless,” a fitting choice for a character intended to be “anonymous. . . a blunt instrument in the hands of the government.”
In Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies, Taryn Simon (*1975) casts herself as James Bond (1900–1989) the ornithologist, and identifies, photographs, and classifies all the birds that appear within the twenty-four films of the James Bond franchise. The appearance of many of the birds was unplanned and virtually undetected, operating as background noise for whatever set they happened to fly into.
Simon’s ornithological discoveries occupy a liminal space—confined within the fiction of the James Bond universe and yet wholly separate from it. This taxonomy of 331 birds is a precise consideration of a new nature found in an alternate reality.
