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£553.50

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Preface dated 1909. The English edition translated by Dr. K. Jordan. Bound in one volume pp. [8], 379, [5] + 89 fine chomolithographed plates. Bound in contemporary (publisher's?) half black leather with black textured cloth covered boards, gilt lettering to the spine. A little general wear and some rubbing to extremities and joints, professional and inconspicuous repair to head and tail of joints. Contents clean and tight, original grey paper endpapers, paper and plates toned as usual, a little offsetting to one or two plates, very short nicks to the lower margins of pages 229-234. Overall a very good copy of sought after vol. I, tome I, which covers European butterflies. [Bibliographic note: This work, which was published in three language editions, German, English, & French is renowned for its outstanding colour plates, some of which required printing from up to 14 different colour blocks (including metallic inks), resulting in quality of colour printing so excellent that it has remained unsurpassed. But this meticulous chromolithographic printing was incredibly expensive and labour intensive. The project was hugely ambitious - to cover every known species of the World's Macrolepidoptera, but it was plagued by setbacks including two world wars and was never finished, after almost 50 years the project finally came to an end in 1954. The most important collections of butterflies and moths were consulted including those of L. W. Rothschild of Tring, the British Museum, the Paris Natural History Museum, and so on. Comparatively recently, having been out of print for over half a century, a number of original sets were discovered in the printer's warehouse and these have been marketed with a hefty price tag. The publisher tended to use the same casings for each volume regardless of how thick that volume was, so where a volume only consists of say 25 plates, the binding/casing appear too large at the spine for the contents, or alternatively blank pages were inserted at the rear.]

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