ORIENTAL ALBUM. CHARACTERS, COSTUMES, AND MODES OF LIFE IN THE VALLEY OF THE NILE

Second Edition: hand coloured tinted lithograph as frontispiece, woodcut vignette on title page, 30 hand coloured tinted lithographic plates by Lemoine, Lehnert, Mouilleron, Le Roux and others after Prisse d'Avennes, each plate guarded with a plain leaf, original half green morocco with green moiré cloth titled gilt on the upper cover and on the spine, recased, three plates frayed at the edges, all edges gilt.

The original binding was made with gutta-percha (a process invented in 1836), which is a flexible latex rubber 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. Typically, before being restored, plates from such albums become loose causing fraying and dust soiling to some of the edges and margins as has happened with the present volume where the frontispiece and two plates at pages 9 (Nizam, or Regular Troops) and 29 (Fellahs, a Man and Woman) are dust soiled and frayed. These plates are illustrated below. Some occasional foxing mainly confined the backs of the plates, generally the plates are clean and bright, a very good copy.

‘Prisse d'Avennes was, in many ways, a paradox. An artist of consummate skill, he was also a writer, scientist, scholar, engineer and linguist, a genius who spent much of his life among the illiterate. French to the bone, he was of British blood; a European, he embraced Islam and took the name Edris-Effendi. By nature contentious, he alienated colleagues, yet succoured the sick and the poor. Of the hundreds of 19th-century Orientalists - those Western artists, scholars and writers who gravitated to the Islamic world following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 - few possessed so prodigious an intellect, such a trove of talents, so insatiable a curiosity or so passionate a commitment to record the historical and artistic patrimony of ancient Egypt and medieval Islam. He succeeded brilliantly, yet he failed to achieve the stature to which his successes entitled him, both during his lifetime and in the 111 years since his death. He remains, as arts writer Briony Llewellyn calls him, "a shadowy figure in the history both of Egyptology and of European response to Islamic art."

‘Achille-Constant-Theodore Emile Prisse d'Avennes was born in Avesnes-sur-Helpe, France, on January Q 27,1807, descendant of a noble English family, Price of Aven, a branch of which had emigrated to France and Gallicised its name to Prisse d'Avennes. With a family tradition of excellence in administrative affairs, the boy was marked for a legal career, but his talents and interests soon dictated otherwise and he transferred to the Ecole des arts et metiers at Chalons, where he acquired drafting and engineering skills that were to be vital in his life's work.

‘Oriental Album, a collection of chromolithographs and woodcuts "From designs taken on the spot by E. Prisse," illustrated the people, costumes and way of life of the Nile Valley, with a commentary in English by the noted Orientalist James Augustus St. John. It was dedicated to the memory of botanist George Lloyd, who had excavated with Prisse and who died at Thebes when his rifle accidentally discharged.’  (https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199006/prisse-a.portrait.htm)