SOUVENIR OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

Includes views of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London and Kimberley.

Large oblong album, 220 x 560 mm, 26 well printed photographic plates including 11 fine panoramas each measuring 175 x 500 millimetres. The 15 other plates each have 4 photographs measuring 120 x 175 millimetres. All the photographs are printed within embossed borders and with brief captions. There in an introductory leaf of text describing Cape Town - \'The Gateway to South Africa\' with a poem on the verso. Other leaves of text describe Simonstown, Port Elizabeth, East London and Kimberley. Bound in cloth - green at the spine and with sides in red, titled in gilt on the upper cover.

The cloth is worn and chipped around the edges, the body of the text - heavy owing to the dimensions and thick card used - has separated from the binding and has been simply repaired with glue, a small blue typed label which appears to have originally been stuck on the front paste-down endpaper is now affixed in the gutter of the first panorama (see illustration below), the top corner of the same plate is slightly damaged by insects and there is some soiling in the margins, overall the plates are clean and bright.

Variants of this album appear in A South African Bibliography, volume I and the Supplement (volume V) with different bindings and selections of photographs. The listing in the Supplement, page 57 comments, \'Several albums containing the same text and varied selections of plates were published by the firm G.B. & Co. George Budricks appears as a \'picture framer and dealer\' in Juta\'s Directory of Cape Town from 1897 onwards, but only in 1910 is the firm listed at G. Budricks & Co., fine art publisher and manufacturer, P.O. Box 1018.\'