Memoirs of the Peter Crossing Collection No. 1. Proof engravings prepared for Sir Joseph Banks from plant drawings made by Sydney Parkinson on James Cook's Endeavour voyage By David J.Mabberley. Privately published in 2024 by Peter Crossing <scp>AM</

The story of the creation of the work generally known as Banks' Florilegium, and its eventual publication after two centuries, has been partially told in the popular and widely available book Joseph Banks' Florilegium, Botanical Treasures from Cook's First Voyage (Gooding, Mabberley & Studholme, 2017). This new, attractively produced volume adds more detail to the torturous process by which original drawings made by Sydney Parkinson of plants collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on the Endeavour mission of 1768–1771, were engraved on copper plates by a team of eventually eighteen artist-engravers, at vast expense, and were eventually printed. Banks' aim was to produce a massive, folio account of the plants new to science found by the expedition, with some 750 plates planned, accompanied by text by Jonas Solander. This grand plan never came to fruition, probably due to constraints on Bank's finances. Not until the late 1980s was a limited edition full set of the plates, printed from the original engravings, issued by Editions Alecto, though the original text was not included. In the interim there had been some limited reproduction of the plates – a very few sets of New Zealand or Australian plants were printed in the 1890s, and a partial set of lithographs after the plates was published 1900–1905 by the British Museum (Natural History). Thirty plates appeared in the luxury volume Captain Cook's Florilegium in 1973. This new book has as its focus the partial sets of proofs printed for Banks in the Eighteenth-century, and particularly the set acquired by the Peter Crossing Collection in 2022. None of these proofs have been previously published. An incomplete set of proofs remains at the Natural History Museum, alongside the original watercolours by Parkinson, and there are some at Kew. It seems that Banks distributed small partial sets of proof-prints to international colleagues. Traced here, these include a set of 45 at the Linnean Society of London, acquired from Carl Linnaeus the Younger. A small number were in Berlin, but disappeared in the Second World War, and some went to Peter Pallas in St Petersburg, also lost without trace, while another set of about 60 were given by Banks to Johan Alströmer in Sweden, in 1777. In 2021 a collection of 32 of these proofs surfaced with a bookseller in Gothenburg, Sweden. Alerted to this, David Mabberley was quickly able to ascertain that they were indeed proof-prints of Banks' Florilegium plates, and the set was ultimately acquired by The Peter Crossing Collection (just too late to be included in the work reviewed above). Of the 32, 20 of the proof-pulls are known only from this set, which circumstantially is believed to be the remnants of that presented to Alströmer. Some are annotated by Banks or Solander. The bulk of this book contains good reproductions of all 32 sheets, accompanied by scholarly notes on each species by David Mabberley. These cover the circumstances of the collection by the Endeavour team, and discuss the plant's current status, ecology and frequently ethnobotany and cultural attributes; a colour photograph accompanies the notes. The collection appears to be quite random, in that the plants figured come from all sections of Endeavour's voyage. It is appropriate for this Special Part to mention that one of the species represented is Nothofagus antarctica, originally drawn by Parkinson in Tierra del Fuego 14–20 January 1769, engraved for Banks by Daniel Mackenzie (Figure 1). The plate shows a fertile shoot, plus magnifications of male and female flowers, the cupule and seeds. This plate is not included by Gooding et al. (2017), as indeed are another 20, making these images available to a general readership for the first time. It seems likely that in the case of Banksia integrifolia and B. serrata these very sheets are those used by Linnaeus the Younger to describe these species, and that they should be considered to be their holotypes. Of value to scholars of Banks and his botanical empire, and to anyone interested in the progress of botanical exploration and the dissemination of its findings, this book is available from The Peter Crossing Collection for AU$55 plus shipping.