VERY UNUSUAL leather bound volume 45cm x 35cm x 3cm which includes a collection of 133 lithographic prints extracted from VANITY FAIR magazines between 1869 and 1872, subjects include CHARLES DARWIN, THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY, ALFRED LORD TENNYSON, THOMAS CARLYLE and JOHN RUSKIN together with numerous other prominent Victorian political, historical, social, literary and royal figures. The collection covers the very first years of the magazine’s caricature series making this a particularly interesting group of Victorian colour lithographs. Each of the 133 figures is gummed in (less their white margins alas) with the biography also extracted from the magazine and gummed in below the print. I am sure there is a means if required of carefully removing them maybe for FRAMING.
What is fascinating is that the original owner has created his or her own meticulous INDEX as photos show. FURTHERMORE, loose inside the volume were an original lithograph print by Ape (“an amateur whip”) plus an EXTREMELY RARE page from Vanity Fair December 1872 listing all the cartoons/ caricatures which had been published up until the end of 1872. They are not sadly all present in this volume.
The CHARLES DARWIN and THOMAS HUXLEY prints are of course rare now and these were issued around the time of Darwin’s theory of evolution with Huxley his main social supporter. Most of the prints in the volume are by Ape with a few, including Darwin, by James Tissot (Coidé).
The leather covers have gilts bands diagonally across outer corners and along spine, wear and tear to extremities with splitting at spine ends, there is scattered foxing through the book in places including some of the prints and endpapers, some tearing to lower sections of a few pages centrally as photo.
SIMPLY INCREDIBLE CATALOGUE OF PRINTS AND NOTHING ELSE LIKE IT FOR SALE AS I WRITE