In the second half of the 18th century, a French naturalist named the Comte de Buffon published "Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière", an encyclopedic multi-volume classification of various species of animals. In 1936, publisher Ambroise Vollard conceived the idea of pairing prints by Pablo Picasso with a selection of texts drawn from this seminal publication of the Enlightenment. (Due to Vollard’s untimely death in a car accident in 1939, however, the publication was realized by his successor Martin Fabiani instead.) Although there is little in the way of dialogue between the image and the written word—and some of the animals depicted are not paired with any text at all—the book nevertheless quickly gained renown for Picasso’s lively animal prints. Georges Cretté custom-made the elaborate, gold-tooled leather binding strewn with feathers for this copy of "Natural History".