Oblong folio. Four parts in two volumes. [90]; [82]pp. Lithographic title to Vol I., terminal advertisements and colophon leaves to each volume (all included in preceding collation). With 79 photo-lithographic plates, one of which double-page. Original publisher's limp cloth, decorated in blind and titled in gilt; Vol II neatly recased in the original binding at an early date. Some rubbing, tearing and a little marking to binding; loss to spines. Sporadic spotting to text and images, occasional marginal tears (including to endpapers) and repairs, only touching the image on two plates. Inscriptions to each front endpaper of 'Mrs Michel' of Whatcombe House (featured in this volume and described as 'not distinguished by any remarkable feature' but as beautifully situated, with 'adjacent grounds extensive and picturesque'.

An unsophisticated copy of the most important study of Dorset country-houses (from their golden age), which was also the first - and only - major English book produced in photolithography and is as such a milestone in the history of permanent photographic reproduction. It was described by Gernsheim as 'not only the first but remained the only attempt in book form to reproduce photographic views from nature by photolithography', and by McLean as marking a 'transitional stage between drawing and unretouched photography'.

As is explained by English photographic pioneer John Pouncy (1818-1894) in both the introduction and advertisements of this present volume, the fading nature of early photography was the revolutionary illustrative median's greatest weakness: 'astonishing as is the effect, and almost perfect as is the beauty of some of these works of art, permanency is found wanting', or, in short 'Photographs very generally fade'. Thus, between the conception and completion of this photographic study of his beloved native Dorsetshire, Pouncy called 'in the aid of another art, that of Lithography; and thus, without forfeiting the exactness which is the peculiar characteristic of the one, to ensure the quality of durability, which is unhappily wanting to it, by means of the co-operation of the other', and so 'the views which were originally announced as Photographs will now appear as Photo-Lithographs'.

As the reproduced excerpt from a contemporary Poole newspaper review highlights, Pouncy's devised process involved transferring long-exposure 'photography to stone, and then re-transfers it to paper'; a service that he also here advertises as available from his Dorchester studios. Non static-features were added in by hand, giving a rather ghostly appearance. The process must necessarily have been both time-consuming and expensive, and each part of this work, published by subscription, was advertised originally at the price of £1 1s, or £5 5s for the planned whole, the fifth and sixth of which were never published. Subscribers included the poet William Barnes, and many of the owners of the houses featured in the book.

Not pure photographs, but not simply hand-drawn lithographs either, his process produced images truly symbolic of the Victorian artistic compact between mechanisation and manual labour; no book could claim to more truly occupy the threshold between photographic and lithographic illustration.