THE MACROLEPIDOPTERA OF THE PALAEARCTIC REGION. THE NOCTUID MOTHS. The Macrolepidoptera of the World Vol. III (3). Complete with 75 Coloured Plates

The English edition. Bound in two volumes; vol. I: pp. (text) [4], iii, 511, [1]; vol. II: [4] + 75 very fine chomolithographed plates. Bound in half leather and cloth covered boards, gilt lettering, good and strong with some light general wear and rubbing to corners and edges. Contents clean and tight, a little foxing to the front free papers. Plates are clean with ruled paper bound in between each plate. A very good copy of vol. 3. [Bibliographic note: This work, which was published in three language editions, German, English, & French is renowned for its outstanding colour plates, some of which required printing from up to 14 different colour blocks (including metallic inks), resulting in quality of colour printing so excellent that it has remained unsurpassed. But this meticulous chromolithographic printing was incredibly expensive and labour intensive. The project was hugely ambitious - to cover every known species of the World's Macrolepidoptera, but it was plagued by setbacks including two world wars and was never finished, after almost 50 years the project finally came to an end in 1954. The most important collections of butterflies and moths were consulted including those of L. W. Rothschild of Tring, the British Museum, the Paris Natural History Museum, and so on. Comparatively recently, having been out of print for over half a century, a number of original sets were discovered in the printer's warehouse and these have been marketed with a hefty price tag. The publisher tended to use the same casings for each volume regardless of how thick that volume was, so where a volume only consists of say 25 plates, as in this case, the binding/casing appear too large at the spine for the contents.] Size: Folio (32 x 25 cm).…