Lot 58: A SOUVENIR SET OF HOLY LAND VIEWS WITH WOODEN GRAPHOSCOPE VIEWER AND PRESENTATION BOX, JERUSALEM, 19TH CENTURY

A SOUVENIR SET OF HOLY LAND VIEWS WITH WOODEN GRAPHOSCOPE VIEWER AND PRESENTATION BOX, JERUSALEM, 19TH CENTURY

A late 19th or early 20th-century souvenir collection comprising twenty-five topographical view cards, a wooden graphoscope viewer, and a decorative storage box. The set features monochromatic prints of significant historical and religious sites in the Holy Land, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Locations depicted include Jerusalem, Jaffa, the Dead Sea, Nazareth, the River Jordan, and Bethlehem. The cards are printed with multilingual captions in English, French, Italian, German, and Russian. The Russian text utilizes pre-1918 Cyrillic orthography, including the characters yat and the terminal hard sign. Transcribed titles include View of Jerusalem, View of Jaffa, The Tower of David, Dead Sea, Russian Buildings, and Saint Sepulchre, Façade. The graphoscope viewer consists of a rectangular wooden box fitted with a large, circular convex glass lens designed to provide magnification and a sense of depth when viewing the prints. The decorative storage box features a blue and white patterned lid with a central pink label bearing gold-embossed Arabic script. The prints appear to be lithographs or early photogravures mounted on cardstock with pale yellow borders.