Beschreibung:

Includes: California Burgundy. Oleographed print from a watercolor by Hannah Millard. 48.2x33 cm (19x13"); over mat: 63.6x45.6 cm (25x18"). With the overprinting of the Italian Swiss Colony imprint on the plate, with the caption "California Burgundy". xi, [64] unbound facsimile signatures with text on rectos only. With 10 loose full-color plates reproducing the original Oleographed (i.e. chromolithographed in oil colors) plates by Edward Bosqui & Co. from the paintings by Hannah Millard. (Folio) 51x37.5 cm (20x14¾"), burgundy cloth portfolio and chemise, front cover lettered in gilt. Despite the limitation statement saying 300, only 65 copies were produced, 25 copies bound thus, 40 were bound in a half-morocco chemise. A single plate from Bosqui's 'Grapes and Grape Vines of California', one of the rarest and most expensive American color plate books ever published. From Zamorano Select "Both as a work on viticulture and as a color-plate book [Grapes...] was an unprecedented achievement for a California press." The Black Hamburgh illustrated here is a table grape that grows best in California's coastal mountain range. Bosqui notes in his text that "the specimen was taken from a vineyard located on one of the declivities on the Western slope of Mount Bache, in the Santa Cruz Mountains". This region has been traditionally compared to Burgundy in France due to similarities between the soil and climate, hence the caption chosen by the printer. The present ot includes a superb facsimile of the original 1877 edition, of which only six or seven complete copies are known to exist. The color separations for the plates in this facsimile were made by Repro-Media, and are faithful to the originals. The book was designed and printed under the direction of Linnea Gentry at Amaranth Press in San Francisco, and bound at the Schuberth Bindery.