In this stunning assemblage of words and images novelist and avid birdwatcher Graeme Gibson
has crafted an extraordinary tribute to the venerable relationship between humans and birds.
Birds have ever been the symbols of our highest aspirations. As divine messengers symbols of
our yearning for the heavens or avatars of glorious song and colour they have stirred our
imaginations from the moment we first looked into the sky. Whether as the Christian dove or
Quetzalcoatl—the Aztec Plumed Serpent—or in Plato's vision of the human soul growing wings and
feathers religion and philosophy have looked to birds as representatives of our better
selves—that part of us not bound to the earth. With the passion of a birdwatcher and hoarder of
words Gibson has spent fifteen years collecting the literary and artistic forms our affinity
for birds has taken over the centuries. Birds appear again and again in mythology and folk
tales and in literature by writers as diverse as Ovid Thomas Hardy Kafka Thoreau and T.S.
Eliot. They've been omens allegories disguises and guides they've been worshipped eaten
feared and loved. Nor does Gibson forget the fascination they hold for science as the
Galapagos finches did for Darwin. Birds figure charmingly and tellingly in the work of such
nature writers as Gilbert White Peter Matthiessen Farley Mowat and Barry Lopez. Gorgeously
illustrated woven from centuries of human response to the delights of the feathered tribes
The Bedside Book of Birds is for anyone who is aware of birds and for everyone who is
intrigued by the artistic forms that humanity has created to represent its soul. From The
Bedside Book of Birds ~ Stevenson remembered the story of a monk who had been distracted from
his copy-work by the song of a bird. He went into the garden to listen more closely and when
he returned after what he thought were only a few minutes he discovered that a century had
gone by that his fellow monks were dead and his ink had turned to dust. The song of the bird
had given him a taste of Paradise where an instant is as a hundred years of earthly time. Was
the same true of time in hell Stevenson asked himself. Alberto Manguel
