This album included six panoramas, among them one or two of Lucknow after the siege, and in the Indian section of the London sale a copy of D.S. Dodgson’s General Views & Special Points of Interest of the City of Lucknow, an 1860 first edition that was complete with title vignette, a plan of Lucknow and 27 tinted litho views, but rather spotted and stained and loose in the publisher’s original but stained cloth binding, was sold to Shapero at £1200 – rather more than the £370 paid for a copy in a Thomson Roddick & Medcalf sale of February 12.
Also seen at Bonhams were copies of two other folio plate collections of Indian interest – Robert H. Sale’s Defence of Jellalabad, a first edition of c.1845 with 22 litho plates by W.L. Walton, and Charles Stewart Hardinge’s Recollections of India..., an ex-library copy of the 1847 first edition with unobtrusive
blindstamps within the platemarks of the 24 tinted litho plates of British India, the Punjab, and Kashmir, as well as the portrait of Maharajah Dhulip Singh that serves a frontispiece. Both the Sale and the Hardinge books were in perished gutta percha bindings of half morocco, with the contents loose but apparently complete.
An album containing 64 hand-tinted albumen prints of Japanese interest, mostly portraits of geishas, samurai warriors, tradesmen, etc. and dated to c.1880, sold at £3400 (Shapero).
Beato’s India and more on that old Siege of Lucknow
The vessel in the foreground of the photograph reproduced right, which at first glance appears to have been deliberately rolled over onto its side, or careened, but which may of course be a special craft, looks uncannily like a vast stranded fish. It is seen here in one of 129 albumen prints of photographs by Felice Beato that sold at £26,000 to Shapero in a Bonhams sale of March 11.
