Royal Tour of India 1905-06 by the Prince & Princess of Wales in the de luxe binding.

Reed, Stanley: THE ROYAL TOUR IN INDIA. A Record of the Tour of T.R.H. The Prince and Princess of Wales in India and Burma, from November 1905 to March 1906. Bennett Coleman & Co [Bombay] 1906, quarto, 1st Edition. In the maroon leather and gold de-luxe binding.

Coloured portriats portraits of the Prince & Princess on card tipped in before the title page, numerous photo illustrations [many full page and including portraits of rulers], sketch route map, xxiv, 510pp, 3pp un-numbered Appendix B. Original maroon full leather gilt with very decorative bevelled boards, some  scuffing to the  edges of boards and a little minor damage to head and tail of spine, internally clean but the heavy binding splitting neatly from the text block before the frontispiece portraits, An old Foreign Office label to the front pastedown but no stamping noted apart from the half title. A previous blank is inscribed in red ink [probably by the publisher,  ] No. 139 Durbar Office de luxe ,A very well illustrated work entirely printed on fine quality glazed art paper, all edges gilt. The illustrations are taken from photographs by Raja Deen Dayal & Sons and by Bourne and Shepherd. This important tour visited Bombay, Indore, Udaipur, Jaipur, Bikanir, Lahore, Peshawar, The Khyber, Rawalpindi, Jammu, Amritsar, Delhi,Agra, Gwalior, Lucknow, Calcutta, Rangoon, Madras, Mysore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Benares, Aligarh, Quetta, Chaman & Karachi. As well as views of tour there are numerous architectural views and portraits of princes and rulers, officials, etc. A most useful work of record for Imperial India. The tour took place 30 years after the visit of the Prince’s father (who was later Edward VII). The Prince and Princess enjoyed their trip and were to visit India again for a Coronation tour in 1911 when the Prince became George V. This volume was followed by the author by a very similar work on the later 1911/12 visit. a very heavy volume which offers suffers much more than this one, the portraits of the Prince & Princess being on card seem almost designed to be removed and often have been.  One of images shows the thickness of this edition compared with the standard one. jun22/1

Note on editions of this book: The standard issue of this book comes in a blue cloth binding [one can be seen elsewhere in this category. This de luxe is bound to appeal especially to Indian Princes and other wealthy Indians and Europeans. The text and illustrations are the same as in the blue edition but printed on thicker paper so that, although the pagination is identical, this edition is 2½ ins thick compared with the 1½ ins of the standard binding. This is the  more glamorous edition in this binding which was issued with a furhter 18 coloured plates of the Princes and a few other figures. Both the de-luxe editions are now hard to find. Most of the coloured plates have been removed. Some of the reminaing ones are loose as they were only very loosely tipped on by one edge. Those remaining are: Lord Lamington, Lord Kitchener, The Maharaja of Kashmir, Lord Minto, Lady Minto, Lord Curzon, Lady Curzon, Sir Andrew Fraser.

The Foreign Office sold off a lot of its ‘surplus’ library stock toward the end of the last century.