Beschreibung:

The Geographical Distribution of the Family Charadriidae or the Plovers, Sandpipers, Snipes and their allies.
London and Manchester: Henry Sotheran & Co., [1887]. Large 4to (320 x 247 mm). 21 hand-colored lithographic plates by and after John Gerrard Keulemans, printed mainly by Hanhart, numerous wood-engraved illustrations and ornaments after or by J.G. Millais, G.E. Lodge, Charles Whymper and others. Original green pebble-grained cloth, titled in gilt on spine and front cover. Condition : title split at inner blank margin and re-inforced on the verso, occasional slight toning; joints rubbed and with repaired splits, inner hinges broken, light scuffing to extremities. Provenance : Rev. F.B. Dickinson (armorial bookplate); Lynn Abbott Trust. first edition, first issue, of this “valuable repository of information” (zimmer) on the shore birds of the world, with excellent hand-colored plates . The first issue can be indentified by the presence of the slender-billed dotterel plate as a frontispiece (the Chilian dotterel replaces it in the second issue) and the list of plates being without the (useful) page numbers found in the second issue. The hand-coloring of the plates is supposed to be superior in the present first issue. The work is based on the collections of James E. Harting, Shelley and Swinhoe, subsequently acquired by the author and finally presented by him to the British Museum. Seebohm also acknowledges his debt to Harting's manuscript notes, as well as the national collections in the British Museum, the South American birds in Salvin and Godman’s collection, and the Smithsonian’s birds from the Pacific Islands. Keuleman's plates concentrate on species which had not previously been illustrated or which had been pictured, but only poorly. Anker 455; Fine Bird Books (1990) p.141; T. Keulemans & J. Coldeway Feathers to Brush p.65; Nissen IVB 850; Zimmer p.568 (“the hand-colored plates are excellent”).