Mémoires Sur les Lépidoptères Rédiges Par N. M. Romanoff. Monographie des Phycitinae et des Galleriinae Par E. L. Ragonot. Tome VIII Avec 34 Planches Coloriées

About this book

Language: French

Volume 8 from the famous 9-volume series usually referred to as Romanoff's Mémoires is particular not only in its being one of the largest and certainly the rarest. Indeed, the series started in 1884 and, though volume 8 was penultimate, it appeared in 1901, i.e. a few years later than volume 9, to become, chronologically, the last in the series. The entire series is fabulous not only in containing the original descriptions of dozens and dozens of new butterfly and moth generic categories, and several hundred new species-group taxa by such eminent lepidopterists of the time like Herz, Christoph, Grum- Grshimailo, Alpheraky and many others, but also most of the drawings being water colour.

Each of the fully hand-painted volumes was bound individually, and only a few, like volumes 7 and 9, contained full-colour lithographs. Volume 8 became the rarest as the most unfortunate as well, because the printrun perished in a fire when only a few copies had been painted. The Central Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences can boast to keep two full-colour copies of volume 8 of Romanoff's Mémoires. Pensoft has recently been officially awarded with the right to reprint this volume facsimile in order to fill in the numerous lacunae existing even in the world's largest biological libraries, let alone private libraries.

Volume 8 represents part 2 of Ragonot's famous monograph on the world fauna of Pyralidae, part 1 being volume 7 of the same series. The monograph is in French, very richly and finely illustrated (34 full-colour plates), containing the description of hundreds of new pyralid moths. By presently reprinting this very rare and old book, Pensoft makes this publication easily available and actually revived from nearly complete oblivion.

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