Cold storage
For this project, illustrations editor Meredith Wilcox and I descended into the dungeon-like cold storage section of the National Geographic archives to root through unscanned images of birds from days past. We had to wear thin white gloves while handling the originals that did very little to stave off the cold, and I remember holding a little kingfisher postcard that I was transferring into the “scan” pile and shivering too hard to read the name of photographer. But my favorite parts of this book are the seldom-seen paintings from former staff artists like Walter Weber, Allan Brooks, and Hashime Murayama.
