A St. Louis widow has given the Missouri Botanical Garden's Peter H. Raven Library one of the rarest books in the world — a first edition of Mark Catesby's 1729 masterwork documenting the natural history of colonial America, complete with hand-colored illustrations of species that no longer exist. Fewer than 100 complete first-edition copies survive anywhere on the planet, and this one is now part of a St. Louis collection that traces its own roots back to the 1400s.
Dorothy (Deecy) Stephens Gray donated the two-volume set in memory of her late husband, Burton Craige Gray, according to an announcement from the Missouri Botanical Garden. As FOX 2 reports, the gift gives the Peter H. Raven Library — located on the garden's St. Louis grounds — its first true first edition of the book, titled *The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands*. The library previously held only the second and third editions of Catesby's work.
That distinction matters because the first edition is the only version featuring plates that Catesby himself etched and hand-colored, per the garden's announcement. Holly Hubenschmidt, director of the Peter H. Raven Library, told FOX 2 that the book has found the right home. “These illustrations are beautiful. I feel like she found the perfect home for it and so to get the first edition where there are so few in the world, is really amazing,” Hubenschmidt said. She added, “This is amazing. I've only been in this position for a little over a year.”
A Naturalist's Four Years in the Field
Catesby spent four years, from 1722 to 1726, exploring South Carolina, Georgia and the Bahamas with backing from fellows of London's Royal Society, according to the Royal Collection Trust. He relied heavily on Native American guides to navigate backcountry trails and identify native species during that fieldwork, the trust notes. He then spent roughly two decades self-publishing the finished work by subscription in London, releasing it in installments between 1729 and 1747.
The book went on to become the first fully illustrated study of North American flora and fauna, and it served as a primary source for Carl Linnaeus when he established binomial nomenclature in 1758, according to HistoryofInformation. Linnaeus cited Catesby's work extensively in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae. The same source notes that Catesby's naturalistic approach to depicting birds and animals in their habitats predated John James Audubon's The Birds of America by roughly a century, setting an artistic and ecological template that Audubon and Alexander Wilson later adopted.
A Record of Species Now Gone
Beyond its value as an antique, the book carries real ecological weight. It contains early visual and scientific records of species that have since gone extinct, including the Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, according to the University of South Carolina. Catesby was among the first naturalists to depict animals alongside their native host plants, the university notes.
The book will need extensive work before the public can view it. A full-time book conservator at the library's dedicated Book Conservation Lab will repair every page, apply new leather where needed and re-bind the volumes, preserving as much of the original as possible, per FOX 2's reporting. That restoration process could take over a year, meaning the volumes will near their 300th anniversary of publication by the time the work is finished. Once complete, the Missouri Botanical Garden plans to make the volumes accessible to the public.
Part of a Deep Collection, Now Digitized
The Catesby gift joins a Rare Book Collection that houses more than 6,500 volumes dating back to the 15th century, including a first edition, first printing of Charles Darwin's 1859 work On the Origin of Species, according to the garden's own account of its holdings. Through its on-site Imaging Lab, the library has already digitized more than 8,000 volumes — roughly 2.5 million pages — made freely available online via the Biodiversity Heritage Library, allowing researchers worldwide to study high-resolution historical texts without handling the fragile originals.
The library itself is named for Dr. Peter H. Raven, who led the Missouri Botanical Garden as president and director from 1971 to 2010 and built it into a global botanical research powerhouse before his death at age 89 earlier this year. The Gray family's gift arrives at a poignant moment for an institution still honoring its longtime namesake, adding a fresh chapter to a St. Louis library whose mission has always been preserving the natural world on paper, even as the species it documents have vanished from the wild.
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