Sea and Land: An Illustrated History

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It’s all fun and games until someone gets bitten in twain by a shark. Illustrations from a Flickr selection of plates from Sea and Land: An Illustrated History (1887) by JW Buel, a compendium of stories about the natural world which tend towards the sensational. Many of these pictures are from what I call the “Die you brute!” school of illustration, in which exotic fauna is always on the rampage and needs to be violently subdued before someone is eaten alive (or bitten in twain). Buel’s book reprints pictures from other volumes including Gustave Doré’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner while one of the tentacled fiends below is an oft-reprinted item by Alphonse de Neuville & Edouard Riou from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The only copy of Sea and Land at the Internet Archive is poor quality, unfortunately; being partial to Victorian sensation I wouldn’t mind seeing the whole thing.

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
Gustave Doré’s Ancient Mariner

6 thoughts on “Sea and Land: An Illustrated History”

  1. Where I work we have two other books by Mr Buel

    1) Beautiful Paris : the splendors, mysteries and people of the great city; photographic representations of its monuments, palaces, statuary, museums, parks, drives, theatres, cafés, galleries, streets, and every-day life of its gay population / with introduction, history of the city, and descriptions by J. W. Buel.

    2) America’s Wonderlands : a pictorial and descriptive history of our country’s scenic marvels as delineated by pen and camera / by J.W. Buel.

    Don’t you love those long overdescriptive titles the used back then. :-)

  2. The Internet Archive has quite a few other Buel titles I’ll be looking through. Sea and Land has an entire page of titles and subtitles, almost a table of contents in itself.

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