Apostrophe Flies

Here is an excerpt from a peculiar volume of natural history found in a used book and records store in Boston, near Fenway Park, in September 1998, on the day of Mo Vaughn's last regular season game as a member of the Red Sox. The original volume consists of 2500, unnumbered, beautifully hand-illustrated pages encased in a hand-sewn vellum binding and cover with velour accents stretched over mahogany boards. It was published in a limited edition of 257 copies, intended for subscribers, of which there seems to have been none. A number of pages are missing from the "Boston copy" (presumably dealers and collectors cut the plates from the book in order to sell them separately), but the following excerpt gives some sense of the scope of the ambitious multi-volume natural history of the Parenthesis. (Larger versions of the plates can be seen by "clicking" on the images, below).








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