270, [6 (of 9)] pp. I.I. Kounin, managing editor; Alex Yaron, art editor. Profusely illustrated from photographs, drawings, prints, etc., some tipped-in. 30.5x23 cm (12x9"), rebound in recent full leather, spine titled with raised lettering; original front wrapper (backed with paper) bound in.
Remarkable and quite scarce tribute by and for the foreign denizens of Shanghai, soon to be scattered by the Japanese occupation and the Communist revolution. The publication marks that "Seventy-five years have elapsed since the amalgamation in 1863 of two of Shanghai's three foreign settlements into one administrative district, the International Settlement." The plethora of illustrations include many paintings and sketches by noted Shanghai Russian artists, among them Alexander Yaron, Vera Kouznetsova (Kuznetzova)-Kichigina, M. Kichigin, I. Gerasimoff, V. Podgoursky, V. Boregar, V. Kravchenko, and N. Koshevsky. The title-page lists the Post Mercury Company Fed. Inc. U.S.A. as the publisher, designed and executed by Adcraft Studios. OCLC/WorldCat lists only six copies, just three in the United States (Cal State Northridge, Trinity College, the Library of Congress). Of the six copies, four of them are paginated as above (though the present copy lacks two leaves at end, which seem to have contained corrections and other matter not integral to the main text); and two others with additional pages, one with the date given as 1938 rather than 1940. Though internal evidence suggests the 1938 date as a possibility, we here follow the WorldCat listing. The scarcity of the work is understandable considering the turmoil of the times, and explained by a short note to a Dr. K. Grafton, College Lecturer in Shanghai, from the business manager of the Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury, dated August 26, 1947: "Thank you for your inquiry... We regret to say that we have not one single copy of 'Diamond Jubilee of the International Settlement' in our possession, as the Japanese destroyed what had been left when they seized our plant..." This copy with an ownership label of Alfred P. Singer, apparently rescued from the original binding, mounted on the front free endpaper - A.P. Singer (1906-1988) was a commercial photographer who moved to San Francisco from Shanghai in 1949.