PEN & PENCIL REMINISCENCES OF A CAMPAIGN IN SOUTH AFRICA.

Illustrated with Twenty-one Beautiful Colour-tinted Lithographs. By Captain Thomas J. Lucas, Cape Mounted Rifles.

35 pages of letterpress, hand coloured lithographic frontispiece, additional hand coloured title page and 19 hand coloured plates each with tissue guards, original brownstraight-grained cloth, covers blind stamped and titled and decorated in gilt on the upper cover and spine, all edges gilt, bookplate on the front paste-down endpaper and a corresponding small stamp below the date on the title page. The cloth is split and lifting for forty millimetres along the spine, top corner of the front free endpaper missing, the hinges are splitting and the binding has been strengthened (the original binding was  made with gutta-percha – a latex solution derived from the Palaquium tree –  which over time dries and cracks. Almost all books bound in this way in the 19th century now need the attention of a bookbinder), the frontispiece and title page are lightly foxed, some foxing on the other plates but this is mainly restricted to the backs of the plates, the hand colouring remains bright, the text pages are generally unaffected. Overall a good well coloured copy.