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Flying Colors
A quarter-century ago, Indiana University Press published The Birds of Indiana—a labor of love with dazzling artwork that still soars. A Portfolio.
By Tony Rehagen
“Do you hear that?” The painter William Zimmerman stopped his friend and publisher, John Gallman, mid-stride as the pair walked across the restaurant parking lot. “Listen,” he said. “It’s a prothonotary warbler.”
Gallman was not a birder. He could spot a common cardinal or a robin or a mallard duck. But as director of Indiana University Press, he had only dealt with the subject a time or two. And on this spring day in 1981, he was beginning to believe that birds were picking his world apart. The book was in trouble. The authors were lined up, and Zimmerman was undoubtedly the right illustrator. But the massive scale of the thing—a definitive guide to every species of avifauna in the state, with bold and detailed illustrations—made for a daunting task. Gallman had no idea how he was going to pay for it.
The two men had just spent lunch discussing the dilemma, and Gallman had carried his frustration outside. He was lost in the problem, his mind frantically filing through possibilities, when Zimmerman told him to be still.
At first, Gallman heard nothing. And then there it was, light on the breeze, the staccato chirp of the unseen songbird. Suddenly, Gallman felt awakened to a new realm of natural beauty. He wanted to trace the song, to see the bird. He wanted to hear other calls, to be able to rattle off their names with as much passion and ease and expertise as Zimmerman. The obstacles no longer mattered. This book, this ode to the singing creature and its kind, would get made. The right way, regardless of expense. And it would be something extraordinary.
