Graphic scenes in the Japan Expedition...comprising ten plates, and an illustrated title-page, printed in colors and tints by Sarony & Co

New York: G. P. Putnam & Co, 1856. Large folio (approx. 20½ x 15"), consisting of a title page, and introduction leaf, and 10 leaves of descriptive text to accompany each of the 10 plates, of which one is a lithograph portrait of Commodore Perry from a daguerreotype by P. Haas, 2 chromolithographs, 7 lithographs printed in 2 colors on India paper and mounted (as issued), original pictorial wrappers with the title enclosed by 8 vignette scenes and an American eagle at the top, the wrappers backed in blue cloth; the whole in the publisher's quarter green morocco lettered in gilt on upper cover; some soiling of the front wrapper and title page a little spotted, but over all very good or better. Heine (1827-1885) was the official artist on Perry's expedition to Japan in 1853-54. The sketches he produced of the places he visited and the people he encountered there, together with the daguerreotypes taken by his colleague Eliphalet Brown Jr., formed the basis of the official iconography of the American expedition to Japan which remains an important record of the country as it was before the foreigners arrived in force. Upon his return to New York in 1855 he published several books: a collection of prints entitled Graphic Scenes of the Japan Expedition; and the 400 sketches which were included in Perry's official report, as well as his memoirs, Reiss um die Welt nach Japan (Leipzig, 1856). Bennett, p. 53: "The plates are very beautiful Japanese scenes and places of special interest, many times finer than the plates in the three-volume regular account of the Perry Expedition." McGrath, American Color Plate Books 123.