"Animals Without Backbones" Illustrations Stand Test of Time

Hatching, cross-hatching, stippling — these are just some of the pen and ink techniques Elizabeth Buchsbaum Newhall utilized to indicate volume, shadow, and light in the hundreds of illustrations she created for the book Animals Without Backbones.

Written in 1938 by Ralph Buchsbaum — Buchsbaum Newhall’s brother and a professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Zoology — this biology textbook focuses solely on invertebrates. The book was so popular when it was published that it was reviewed in Time magazine.

“The University of Chicago Press told my parents that it was their bestseller after The Bible,” says Vicki Buchsbaum Pearse, PhD, a biologist who is the daughter of the author and recently donated the original drawings to the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums.

Chapters include “Comb Jellies,” “Roundworms,” “The Lobster and Other Arthropods,” and “The Grasshopper and Other Insects.”

As a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, Buchsbaum Newhall created all the illustrations for the first edition. Each chapter also begins with one of her drawings in scratchboard, a reverse drawing technique where the artist creates an image by scratching away parts of solid black ink that covers a white board.

“Elizabeth brought to the table a brand new way of thinking about science and understanding shapes and forms,” says Tim Phelps, MS, FAMI, professor and medical illustrator in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who is working on a biography of Buchsbaum Newhall.

“The drawings and mark making were so elegant and purposeful that they were like nothing else that anybody had ever seen,” according to Phelps, who first saw the book at age nine and says it influenced his own path to creating art.

“These drawings really hone in on what’s important. They’re didactic from the beginning. They’re making decisions, and they’re telling a story about what we need to be looking at and what we need to see,” says Sheridan Dean Elisabeth Long, MLIS, MFA.

“We already have a very strong history in the collections of medical illustrations and illustrations of that study. So, this will tie in with many other important collections that we have,” Long says.

While housed in temperature-controlled and humidity-controlled storage optimized to preserve paper material, the drawings and other materials in the special collections are used for classes across the university as well as for research.

“For these drawings, it could be a class helping students understand there is this really imaginative and creative world that is part of science. Students could be investigating the role of women in science at the time, and that illustration was one of them,” Long says.

Buchsbaum Pearse decided to give these original drawings to Johns Hopkins on the recommendation of another donor, Geoff Alexander, director of the Academic Film Archive of North America (AFA). In 2022, Alexander gave the university more than 7,600 vintage educational films, which included a series of films Ralph Buchsbaum completed with Encyclopædia Britannica Films.

Reflecting on her father’s work and Animals without Backbones, Buchsbaum Pearse says, “The book was really a family project. In addition to my father and Elizabeth, my mother Mildred was thoroughly involved from the beginning, and her sister typed the manuscript. In later versions over the years, my mother joined the authorship, together with my husband John and me, and we worked with artists faithful to Elizabeth’s style.”

“And it’s exactly right that all the art and its history will be preserved and shared widely. Elizabeth deserved that,” she adds.