Book
Being a passionate individual for natural science, Charles Darwin joined a five-year voyage beginning on December of 1831. The voyage included sailing through the Atlantic Ocean, the southern parts of South America, and Australia. Through his time on the voyage, he became interested in the diversity of wildlife and fossils he observed, leading him to conduct his own investigations.
The theory of evolution are the fruits of said investigation, which were published into On the Origin of Species on the 24th of November, 1859. The theory aims to untangle the mystery of the vast biodiversity seen on earth, and understand wildlife to a greater degree.
Darwin’s theory sought to explain the diversity of life through the mechanism of natural selection and likening evolution to a large tree of branching paths. This branching paths method of visualizing the process of evolution and natural selection can be see in the image to the left, illustrating the theory that all organism are descendants of a common ancestor as well.
In the copy I obtained from the University of Toronto Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the book’s publishing is attributed to John Murray of Albemarle Street in London, who printed the book in 1859.
The book’s front and back are a plain black hard cover, with a different harder material used for the book’s spine’s surrounding area and the top and bottom corners of the opposite side. This can be seen in the image gallery below.
As seen in the first image of the below gallery, the spine’s cover has become severely damaged and has detached from the front and back covers, leaving the front cover, back cover and spine’s cover as three individual pieces. In the second image, holding the spine cover in place reveals it to be red and black, but heavily chipped.
The book binding in the spine is functional in only some parts, leaving several chunks of pages at the start of the book as loose leaf and detached. Locating the area at which the book binding is split, seen in the third image is the book divided into two halves, only barely held together by one strand of binding.
In contrast to paper quality of today, the book features pages that are brown instead of white. Despite the edge of the paper darkening into a dark brown, the pages seen in the fourth image are relatively pristine and well kept, showing no discernable signs of decay besides coloring. Presumably having been accessed more often, the pages towards the start and end of the book feature much greater degrees of fraying and rips along the edge, page 48 in image five being an example of this.