Days at the Coast: or, The Frith of Clyde, Its Watering Places, Scenery, and Associations [ILLUSTRATED BY TWELVE PHOTOGRAPHS]

Glasgow: Andrew Duthie, 1865. Hardcover. vg to vg+. Quarto. 125pp. (interleaved with 12 photographic plates). Original period green buckram boards with gilt lettering, decorative tooling and ruling on the covers. Beveled edges. Edges of book block in gilt. Brown endpapers. Photographic frontispiece. Gilt stamp of Glasgow bookseller McPhail on the interior front cover.

"Days at the Coast", a poetic travelogue of locations around the the Firth of Clyde*, by Glasgow-area writer Hugh MacDonald (1817-1860) was first issue in 1857 and became a local bestseller. A number of subsequent editions were issued over next twenty years, but the most sought after and scarce of these is this very special edition issued in 1865, which most notably includes 12 original evocative landscape photographs of the area by pioneering Scottish photographer Thomas Annan (1829-1887). Each image (including the frontispiece) is captioned underneath, mounted on heavy stock paper and protected with a tissue guard. Text throughout is printed in a two-column format. A table of contents and a list of photographs are included at the front of the book.

Binding with minor rubbing and bumping to the corners. Interior with some sporadic foxing and water stains, most notably in the initial few pages. In most other cases its confined to the margins. Images are vibrant and mostly clean overall. Binding in very good+, interior in very good condition overall. Binding protected in modern mylar. Extremely scarce with only 2 OCLC holdings worldwide for this special photographically illustrated edition of the work.

*By the late 19th century the spelling "firth" for the same word had become most commonly used.