Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“One of the greatest lithographic works ever printed.”

Out of the romance of Napoleon’s ill-fated 1798 adventure in Egypt and Lord Byron’s Eastern travels, memorialized in his exotic poetry, came a fascination for the Near East and the places of scripture and revelation. It was a fascination that touched Scotsman David Roberts, the leading landscape painter of his day, who had honed his technique and established his reputation as an artist of the scenic and exotic with his sketches of Spain and Morocco, published in the early 1830’s.

But the appetite of the Victorian book-buying public for views of the mysterious East, still relatively unseen by Western eyes, set Roberts on the course that would determine his immortality. As a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, Roberts was given unfettered access to the tombs, temples, monuments and ruins of Egypt, Syria and the Holy Land.

Louis Haghe, the impresario of the new illustration technique of lithography, oversaw the publication in six extraordinary books all the detailed grandeur of 250 of Roberts’s drawings. Tinted in color, and published a few short years before the advent of photography, these images permanently fixed in the popular imagination such sites as the Great Sphinx of Giza and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

We offer an exceptional first quarto edition of Robert’s Holy Land, three volumes in beautiful publisher’s morocco-gilt.