Did these little fellows see their shadows, I wonder?

Happy Groundhog Day to you! This image is just one of more than 150 more lithographed images of four-legged beasts that appeared in Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America in the 1840s. The Library has made the art from this work available for easy browsing in the NYPL Digital Gallery, so go and check out the other animal portraits. (I'm partial to the prairie dogs myself.)

Lithography was developed in Germany in 1798 by Aloys Senefelder, and this manual printing method uses a flat stone surface, water, and greasy medium to create the image. To learn more about lithography, read Bamber Gascoigne's invaluable reference How to Identify Prints. This friendly guide can help you to sort your engravings from your etchings, and your woodcuts from your wood engravings. And you'll learn about the variety of means of making printed illustrations by hand. Gascoigne cannot teach you about the weather, however; you'll have to count on a groundhog for that.