Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy

Hello, <<Name>>! This is an irregular holiday-spirited announcement of a small, joyful effort to subvert the forces of consumerism (which none of us can fully escape, inhabiting the region of spacetime that we do) and channel them instead toward beauty, delight, and the conservation of this irreplaceable Pale Blue Dot we share.

Like last year, I have endeavored to restore some botanical, astronomical, and natural history illustrations from centuries-old books, and have turned them into living companions — backpacks and pillows, prints and puzzles, stationery cards and notebooks, water bottles and fanny packs, clocks and cutting boards — with my share of the proceeds benefitting The Nature Conservancy. And, once again, the fine folks at Society6 — the service that manufactures and ships the physical incarnations of my designs — have kindly agreed to match my donation.

Last year, we raised more than $20,000 for the conservation of this living wonderland — here is to even more this year, as you lavish your most beloved human animals with uncommon presents from the past ensuring a more livable future for generations to come.

Among the gifts are:

• a fanny pack (the first of these things I made, originally for myself, which has now traveled many a forest mile) featuring the phases of Venus and Saturn by the self-taught 17th-century astronomer and artist Maria Clara Eimmart
• a handsome framed art print of the Solar System quilt the 19th-century Iowan Ella Harding Baker spent seven years embroidering to teach women astronomy in an era before they had access to formal education
• a yoga mat (which I myself have and love and just used) featuring the blues from Abraham Gottlob Werner’s pioneering 19th-century nomenclature of color that Darwin carried aboard the Beagle
• a cutting board featuring a sweet sleepy octopus from the world’s first illustrated encyclopedia of deep-sea cephalopods, which upended our millennia-deep hubris that this blue world is lifeless below 300 fathoms
• stationery cards featuring the glorious red poppy from Elizabeth Blackwell’s unexampled illustrated encyclopedia of medicinal plants, which this young mother made in 1737 after teaching herself art and botany to feed her small child and get her husband out of debtor’s prison
• coasters and a serving tray featuring art from Thomas Wright’s visionary 1750 theory of the universe, the first to describe the spiral shape of the Milky Way and imagine the existence of other galaxies
• a thermos bottle (which I also have and love and use daily) emblazoned with the November meteor showers from Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s stunning 19th-century astronomical drawings
• a bath mat featuring one of the otherworldly jellyfish Ernst Haeckel, who coined the term ecology, studied and painted to salve the heartbreak of his life

...and many, many other wearable, washable, wallable, wantable wonders.