John Henry Dick Scrapbooks

     Born in Islip, New York in 1919, John Henry Dick was attracted to nature at an early age. Dick was especially fascinated by birds and established his own wildfowl aviary at his family estate, with pheasants, quail, ducks, and geese. He attended Yale Art School before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II.

After the war, Dick decided to become a bird illustrator. In 1947, he moved permanently to Dixie Plantation, his family's winter home twenty miles south of Charleston. His first major work was four illustrations for Alexander Sprunt's South Carolina Bird Life in 1949. Three years later he gained national recognition by winning the highly competitive annual Duck Stamp Contest sponsored by the Fish and Wildlife Service. He subsequently provided illustrations for twelve books on wildlife and wrote and illustrated his travel account Other Edens. When not travelling around the world to document, photograph, and paint birds, Dick constructed his own Eden at Dixie Plantation. Here he was surrounded by birds, both in real life and in art. His impressive aviary contained a wide variety of waterfowl, pheasants, cranes, and peafowl. During the late 1940s Dick also became a serious collector of fine illustrated bird books, primarily from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Over the years he acquired a magnificent collection of bird illustration. Among his rare titles were the complete elephant folio editions of John James Audubon's Birds of America, Edward Lear's Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, the complete works of John Gould, and beautiful, valuable titles by Buffon, Edwards, Manetti, Levaillant, Knip, Temminick, Frisch, Dresser, Elliott, Sharpe, and other prominent authors and illustrators. When John Henry Dick died in 1995 at the age of 76, he left his beloved Dixie Plantation and his magnificent collection of rare books to the College of Charleston.

The following are a collection of scrapbooks donated to the College of Charleston by John Henry Dick.