Bibliography of Natural History Travel Narratives, written by Anne S. Troelstra

Hb, €225.Anne S. Troelstra's large and impressive reference work is a useful guide to a particular kind of travel narrative: "a chronologically ordered story of travel, located more or less precisely in time, in which natural history observations and the collection of natural history objects play an important part" (9), with "natural history" taken to include botany, zoology, mineralogy, and geology, but not ethnology.Troelstra, a guest researcher in the special collections of the University of Amsterdam library and an emeritus professor of mathematics at the same institution, here catalogues many hundreds of such texts in their various editions and translations-primarily books but also a small number of article-length narratives-from the mid-sixteenth to the twenty-first century.Arranged alphabetically by author, the entries offer concise sketches of the writers' lives and travels, a comprehensive list of the editions and translations of their narratives, and, in most cases, a short list of sources where scholars can find more biographical information.Entries range from less than half a page for relatively minor figures with few publications to considerably longer for well-known and influential authors.Charles Darwin, for example, merits seven and a half pages.As Troelstra himself acknowledges, completeness in this sort of endeavor is inevitably out of reach.Natural history travel narratives have appeared in great numbers over the centuries, and physical copies are scattered around the world, making personal inspection of every edition of each text impractical for a single person.Troelstra instead mostly bases his bibliography on internet sources such as library catalogues and scanned books.This choice obviously allows inclusion of far more works than would otherwise be possible, but also makes the data less than entirely reliable.In Troelstra's own example, webbased catalogues often do not contain complete information, and sometimes contradict each other, meaning that this volume "cannot match a bibliography solely based on autopsy" (7).A second limitation the author acknowledges is his own linguistic ability.Writes Troelstra in the volume's introduction, "the coverage of publications in French, English, German and Dutch is good; in Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and the Scandinavian languages at least fair; the coverage of editions in other languages is fragmentary" (9).In a work of such ambitious scope, these limitations are understandable and do not, in this reviewer's opinion, outweigh its usefulness.It would no doubt be easy for some specialists of particular periods or linguistic traditions to identify texts that

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