The Floral Magazine: Figures and Descriptions of the Choicest New Flowers

A very good run of the first five volumes from the New Series of this very rare botanical.

Complete with 240 handcoloured botanical plates by Worthington George Smith (212) and Frederick William Burbidge (28)

Flowers include many species of elegant orchids, roses, camellias, dahlias, hyacinths, rhododendrons, pansies, geraniums, and many other popular Victorian garden flowers.

Bernard Quaritch in a General Catalogue of Books in 1874 praises the series for its "beautifully coloured plates" and notes it was already "very scarce."

Five volumes edited by Henry Honywood Dombrain (1,2), Worthington George Smith (3,4) and Frederick William Burbidge (5), published from 1872 to 1876. (Volumes 11 to 15 in the complete series).

The Floral Magazine launched in 1861 and introduced exotic flowers from tropical lands as well as hybrids raised in British nurseries. The lithographic plates were dynamic, full-page botanical illustrations in large format Royal or Imperial Octavo size. Unlike the French and Belgian gardening magazines that had switched to chromolithography by this time, Dombrain and his colleagues kept to the old-fashioned, hand-coloured lithographs, many highlighted with gum arabic.

The first 10 volumes were illustrated with 560 plates by Walter Hood Fitch, James Andrews and J. Worthington Smith from 1861-71. The new series of another 10 volumes was illustrated by Worthington George Smith, Frederick William Burbidge and John Nugent Fitch from 1872-81.

Henry Honywood Dombrain (1818-1905), clergyman gardener, was editor of the Floral Magazine from 1862 to 1873.

Worthington George Smith (1835-1917), architect, engraver and mycologist. Smith also illustrated The Gardener's Chronicle.

Frederick William Burbidge (1847–1905) was a British explorer, plant collector, and author of Cool Orchids, Domestic Floriculture, The Narcissus, etc.

Very scarce, no other copies available online, last volumes at auction at Bonhams Oxford in 2013 and Sotheby's London 2018.

Complete sets of all 20 volumes at RHS Library, University of Oxford, and National Library of Wales.

In full green morocco, spines with five raised bands, title and volume number labels in honey-coloured leather and gilt, marble endpapers, interior bright and clean with vibrant colour plates, just a few scattered spots. Housed in a custom case. Leather spines faded to brown, gilt titles on spines read "Froral Magazine" (sic), a few text pages with repaired holes in paper with loss of text.