Peking: The Camel Bell,, 1936. The Chinese city that never slept First edition, first printing, of this rich record of street life in Republican Beijing written by an American military attaché. Employing candid photographs, colourful drawings, and even musical scores, the work captures the itinerant and human side of Chinese urban economic life in the 1930s aspects less well recorded in many travel narratives and photobooks. Calls, Sounds and Merchandise details 54 types of pedlar, divided according to the season where they are most active, including the "toy peddler", the "feet fixer", and the intriguingly named "running band boat". The author, Samuel Victor Constant (1894-1989), was a US Army officer and a specialist in Asian languages. In 1924, he was posted to China to serve as a military attaché and, during 12 years in Beijing, he gathered material for the present work. Shortly after his death, it was republished by the Bird & Bull Press in the United States, while a Chinese translation - Jing du jiaomai tu - was released in Beijing in 1994. This is a pleasing survival of Beijing's thriving early 20th-century expatriate cultural milieu. The publisher, the Camel Bell, was a legendary shop based in the Grand Hotel de Pekin and overseen by the American Helen Burton. Her store was popular with Westerners who dropped in to buy silks, furs, curios and art, and Burton appears regularly in many memoirs of Republican Beijing. This copy was sold by the Peking Bookshop, another favourite haunt of foreigners located within the Grand Hotel des Wagons-Lit in the Legation Quarter. Landscape octavo (184 x 262 mm). With 16 photographs tipped in, white papercut, colour illustrations of each type of pedlar and their wares, illustration of the eight trigrams, 2 musical scores of pedlar songs. Chinese thread xianzhuang-style binding, original decorative brocade boards, front board with title in black to red label mounted on white paper, orange and white patterned endpapers, folded leaves. Housed in original patterned case with title label. Bookseller's ticket ("The Peking Bookshop, Grand Hotel des Wagons-Lits, Peking") to rear pastedown, corresponding redaction and overstamping of publisher imprint to title page. Joints professionally refurbished, brocade bright with small losses, contents lightly foxed and toned, else clean, photographs and illustrations attractive. A very good copy of this delicate publication in the very good case with moderate rubbing and two joints neatly repaired.
