Memory of the World

Originating in and imported from the East, the technique of falconry was known from Antiquity and was practised as much in the East as in the West.
The Pierre-Amédée Pichot collection consists of a very unusual set of books and drawings on falconry. The owner donated the collection to the municipal library of Arles, which became the depository of a truly unique documentary heritage in this field. This collection groups books from large different part of the world, since falconry was known to a large number of civilizations down through history. Pierre-Amédée Pichot (1841-1921) travelled wherever he could find something about falconry. Encouraged by the Queen of Holland, and helped by genuine network of correspondents, he stimulated a very real historical and ethnological interest on falconry.

This incomparable documentary series is quite complete. It reflects the passion of a man for a practice shared by different societies and for the safeguarding of human cultural heritage. The collection includes books in Chinese, Danish, English, German, Italian, Polish and Russian. It also contains outstanding book-bindings, particularly from the turn of the twentieth century ; the collection is stamped with the ex libris of Pichot featuring a falcon. As a writer, Pichot published in 1865 a work on Falconry, 'La fauconnerie en Angleterre et en France', but it is mainly the large number of documents that he collected which shows the place and importance of falconry in the history of Oriental and European societies.