£120
Oblong folio, ff. [25] + 24 mounted plates – 8 colour (chromolithograph?) and the rest photogravure. Printed on buff paper. Original buff card wrappers printed in black, stitched with brown yarn as issued. A touch of offsetting from plates. Wrappers rubbed and chipped to edges, rear wrapper creased.
A scarce collection of poetry and photographs from 'Lotus Land' - colonial Burma, present-day Myanmar. The photographs are by Frances Matilda Muriel (1860-1953), wife of a civil servant posted to Burma, and the verses are by Rodway Charles John Swinhoe (1863-1927), Mandalay-based solicitor and librettist. It is a difficult item to date accurately, but two of the poems included were set to music by J.W.J. Alves and those musical scores were published in 1909 and 1910. Library Hub records a copy at SOAS, which is dated [191-?], an undated copy at GSA, and a variant in green cloth produced for the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 at Manchester; Worldcat adds half a dozen more with speculative dates between 1900 and 1948. As a tourist production it may have been reprinted many times, but the form and scarcity suggest the earlier part of the range of estimated dates.
