The only publication Joseph Banks (1743–1820) is remembered for is the Florilegium, a series of illustrations that represent the plants he and Daniel Solander (1733–1782) collected during the Endeavour voyage to the Pacific between 1768 and 1771, which remained unpublished until the 1980s. However, from the early 1780s, Banks published and oversaw the production of a large number of different works concerning the botany of the West Indies, Japan, India, China, Africa and species cultivated in Kew Gardens.
My discussion will be in two parts, concentrating on Banks’s books Reliquiæ Houstounianæ (1781), on the plants of the West Indies, and Icones Selectæ Plantarum (1791), on the plants of Japan. The first will examine the processes employed to produce a work of natural history in the late eighteenth century, which involved the conversion of a three dimensional natural history collection into a printed work. Banks’s publications were privately printed, using the highest quality materials and most skilled craftsmen available in London. Secondly, I examine the distribution of these works. Banks had a small number of copies printed that he circulated to a specific group within the Republic of Letters and to those undertaking fieldwork in Asia and the West Indies, avoiding the emergent commercial publishing industry. An analysis of these publications from their inception to distribution gives a new understanding of the methods and incentives for producing a work of natural history in late eighteenth-century Britain.
