[German and English Victorian wood engraving.] Album containing 'Geo. F. Tabram's Specimens of Wood Engraving 1842-8', including grotesque figures and chivalric scenes, with an original drawing and two German specimens loosely inserted.

An attractive collection of 76 engravings, laid down over 34pp, on the first seventeen brown-paper leaves of a 22.5 x 29 cm landscape album. Also laid down, on the rear pastedown, is a nice original drawing (by Tabram himself?) of two girls, one in a bonnet and the other (her daughter or sister?) with ringlets. Loosely inserted are two German engravings, each laid down on a piece of coloured paper and each with caption on reverse. One (11 cm square), from 1847, engraves the Hail Mary in German in fancy type; the other (5 x 5.5 cm), from 1848, is printed in red, and depicts an archer in a chariot pulled by two white horses. The album and its contents are in good condition, lightly aged, in good and tight brown cloth binding with the word 'SPECIMENS.' in gilt on the front cover. Three leaves have been cut away. Inscription on front free endpaper: 'Geo. F. Tabram's | Specimens of Wood Engraving | 1842-8'. Comprising seventy proofs (mainly woodcuts) on India paper, five steel engravings by A. H. Payne of his own views of Leipzig on thicker paper, and a small vignette of two cherubs cut from a magazine. Many of the others are clearly German, with a fair degree of grotesquerie, although others include a view of the Bannut Tree House, Castlemorton. Topics include chivalric scenes, African natives, architectural and topographic views, animals (fine engravings of zebra and tiger), drinking, the Monument, fashionable and bibulous figures. Little is known regarding the compiler. The London Gazette reports the dissolving on 1 July 1862 of the partnership between 'Henry Grist, William Grist, and George Frederick Tabram, of Dyehouse Mills, in the parish of Minchinhampton, in the county of Gloucester, Flock and Shoddy Manufacturers'. Parliamentary papers describe him as a 'Clerk' in Cainscross Savings Bank, Gloucester, in 1874.