India: My Land & its People.

New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery,, 1997. First edition of this excellent exhibition catalogue, published in the same year as Rai's first retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art; a second edition was issued in 2007 but the first is commercially scarce and an online institutional search records copies in just a dozen libraries: eleven in the United States and one at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. A protégé of Cartier Bresson, who nominated him to join Magnum Photos in 1977, Rai (b. 1942) has established a reputation as one of the outstanding post-war photographers and photojournalists. Landscape octavo (243 x 327 mm). Presentation binding of reddish brown half sheep, gilt lettered and decorated spine, sides and corners trimmed with decorative gilt fillet, dark red cloth sides, marbled endpapers, tasselled bookmarker. Illustrated throughout with half-tones printed on coated paper. A few scuffs to front cover, slight pest damage to top corners, closed tear on front free endpaper neatly repaired with Japanese tissue, contents a little cockled at fore edge. A handsome copy.