Book excerpt: This is a chronicle of encounters with a lot of bird books, in fact a lifetime of such encounters. The world of bird books is vast and varied, defying coherent descriptions. The author’s qualification for making this attempt to describe it is that he owns several hundred of them, gathered over more than 70 years. To help make sense of this obsession, the description of the books is linked to life in which traditional birdwatching (and book hunting) went on, in different places, and in between other things.