Brazil’s native fruits, drawn by a botanist

Frederico Carlos Hoehne wrote Frutas Indígenas for the Instituto de Botânica in São Paulo, under the Secretaria da Agricultura, Industria e Commercio, and its title leaf is dated November 1946. Its subject is the fruit-bearing plants native to Brazil: what they look like and how a botanist tells one from another.

The drawings carry much of the book. Plate after plate shows leaves, flowers and fruit, and the other parts a botanist uses to identify each plant. On the cover and title leaf, printed in colour, is the cambuci, a fruit associated with the São Paulo region. Large in format and written in Portuguese, it is a scientific catalogue that is also a book of pictures.

This copy is in its original tan card wrappers, with the coloured image on the front. The covers are creased, the spine worn and splitting, and the corners chipped and rubbed; the stitching shows at the gutter. The 88 pages have not been collated.