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BRACKENBURY, George. The Campaign In The Crimea: An Historical Sketch. Second Series ... Il1ustrated by Forty Plates, From Drawings Taken on the Spot By William Simpson. London: Paul and Dominic Colnaghi and Co., ..., 1856. First edition of the Second Series. Small 4to., orig. royal blue cloth with elaborate decoration on the upper board and spine, with the decoration duplicated in blind on the rear board, a.e.g., (viii), 136pp. With forty tinted lithograph plates and a frontis (engraved title) lithographed by Day & Son. There is some foxing that mostly affect the verso of the plates, but there are some plates where the foxing has penetrated the image and the margins; this copy has been professionally recased with new endpapers, a touch of rubbing but is in fact an about fine copy in an attractive and elaborate publisher's cloth binding.
Simpson, an artist employed by Day & Son, 'was sent out by the Pall Mall printsellers, Paul and Dominic Colnaghi, to report the Crimean Campaign. He sent back eighty-one sketches, which were lithographed and printed by Day & Son, in two or three colours, and published at intervals within a month or so of being received. They were then issued in volumes, in 1855 and 1856 ... Simpson avoided illustrating the more gruesome aspects of the war, but made magnificent pictures of the wild and rocky coasts, the barren uplands, and scenes of the soldier's lives in trenches and redoubts, some of them grim enough.' (McLean: Victorian Book Design, p.126.)