Through contacts and dogged determination he found subscribers, printers and enough species to fulfil this extraordinary project. It was innovative and pioneering, not only in the world of ornithology, but in the size and scale of the whole venture: his insistence on having even the largest species reproduced life-size provided dramatic prints on ‘Double Elephant’ size paper (approximately 40 x 28 inches; 100 x 67cm) one of the largest sizes of European handmade paper.

Subscribers received the illustrations in ‘numbers’ of five loose plates at a time: one large, one medium and three small. There was no text other than a title page to each volume. One of these original subscriptions was taken out by George IV and continued after his death by Queen Adelaide, wife of his successor William IV: this is the copy in the Royal Library.