A rare and desirable elaborately and costly production by A. & C. Black on what was then an extremely exotic locale, i.e. Burma [Burma, Myanmar, etc.].
Talbot Kelly, R. [Commander of the Medjidieh]. Burma Painted and Described. London. Adam and Charles Black, 1905. 261pp.
Rare first edition, first issue, with the called-for catalogue of adverts dated 1905 to the rear.
Absolutely beautiful and elaborately designed and executed pictorial cloth, with peacock design blocked in gilt, blue and red. Top edge gilt. 75 full-page color illustrations under captioned tissue guards. Fold out sketch map to the rear, slightly creased. A very good copy indeed, lightly faded spine and occasional spots of foxing. The slightest of damp stain on lower edge of boards, onto the last sheets. Worst of it in images. Small nick at base of cloth.
A better than usual copy in every way save the minor stain. Often found very faded; not so here.
Talbot Kelly was unfamiliar with Burma (Myanmar)when he received the commission for this book. His travels took him from Rangoon and other towns, up the Irrawaddy and through the jungle. "The difficulties under which I worked were great: fatiguing journeys through forest and jungle, climatic conditions most unkind to the painter, difficulty of language and health and, the supremest difficulty . . . of rightly appraising a strange country." Nonetheless, the impression he provides both pictorial and verbal are enough to intrigue and delight the reader.
