A plant’s path to publication – Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624) and Johann Theodor de Bry (1561–1623)

The Basel botanist Caspar Bauhin is justly famed for bringing order to late Renaissance botany. Through his Phytopinax (Basel, 1596), Prodromos Theatri Botanici (Frankfurt, 1620), and, above all, Pinax Theatri Botanici (Basel, 1623), Bauhin prepared the way for his Theatrum Botanicum. He envisioned this as a comprehensive, systematic, illustrated account of all six thousandplus plants known to him. His contemporaries had high regard for these works; a century later, Linnaeus found them indispensable. Today, they remain our key to pre-Linnaean botanical literature.