The Beauties of the Bosphorus

London: Virtue & Co., 1840. Later printing. Hardcover. A very nice copy. A popular and handsome view book, first published in 1838, which went into many editions. This a bright clean copy in nice binding that seems to align with OCLC: 6646879. 4to, 85 plates & a map. Frontis of Miss Pardoe, decorative title page, (2), plate, xii, (3)-172, strong impressions of the 85 steel engraved views of Turkey & the Danube, and a map. All edges gilt. Original half dark green gilt decorated morocco and gilt decorated cloth boards, marbled endpapers. Spine in six compartments, calf a little rubbed but an extraordinarily clean, unfoxed copy.

The British travel writer Julia S. H. Pardoe (1806-62), who, suffering from consumption, had been taken south early in her youth, accompanied her father to Constantinople in 1835 and was famous for her literary reports on Portugal and the Near East even as a child. "Since Lady Mary Wortley Montagu probably no woman has acquired so intimate a knowledge of Turkey [. Her] works, written [.] in a pleasant and graceful style, attracted a large share of notice, and, as popular history, may still be read with pleasure" (DNB). - First published in 1838 with only 78 plates; later editions were published under the title "Picturesque Europe" (1854 and 1874). The pretty views are engraved after William Henry Bartlett (1809-54), whose series of oriental and American topography were then very popular (cf. Thieme/B. II, 554). BLC 246, 438. DNB 15, 201, 5. Cf. Aboussouan 711 (first ed. 1838). Weber I, 1151 (1850).