![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/The-book-is-actually-the-size-of-a-booklet--The-ti_1748283684659.jpg\")
The book is actually the size of a booklet. The title is simple: \u2018Album of Delhi Guide Containing 72 Views.\u2019 (HT) <\/p>\nMay 27, 2025 06:30 AM IST <\/p>\n
An unknown 1900 book, ‘Album of Delhi Guide,’ reveals rare photos of Delhi’s timeless monuments before drastic changes, discovered in Normandy. <\/p>\n
Thousands of books have been written on Delhi. Historians, novelists, poets, journalists and photographers continue to mine the inexhaustible megapolis, producing even more books. One of these volumes is truly precious. Published around 1900, it is largely unknown, and so rare that it isn\u2019t available even in an online bookstore specialising in such themes. This reporter discovered it recently in a shop for old used books in a most unlikely place: a small town in Normandy, France. The book was originally priced at rupees 5; it was now acquired for 10 euros (around a thousand rupees).<\/p>\n
The book is actually the size of a booklet. The title is simple: \u2018Album of Delhi Guide Containing 72 Views.\u2019 (HT) <\/p>\n
The book is the size of a booklet. The title is simple: \u2018Album of Delhi Guide Containing 72 Views.\u2019 It bears black-and-white photos of the city captured during a pivotal shift in its character. The violent end of the Mughal empire was still in living memory; independence from the British just decades away. The \u2018Album\u2019 was published by H.A. Mirza & Sons, the self-proclaimed \u201cViews Photographers.\u201d<\/p>\n
H.A. Mirza & Sons was a legendary photo studio in Old Delhi (it was fleeting mentioned on this space a few days back for a separate story). Located in Faiz Bazar, the studio produced India-centric picture postcards of world-class quality. The postcards were printed not in India, but in Germany. The studio\u2019s pictures of the Islamic shrines in present-day Saudi Arabia are considered so precious that a Harvard academic (Professor Ali Asani) co-wrote a paper in 1998 titled \u2018Through the Lens of Mirza of Delhi: The Debbas Album of Early-Twentieth-Century Photographs of Pilgrimage Sites in Mecca and Medina.\u2019<\/p>\n
The pictures in the Delhi book are surreal. They show familiar forts and tombs, yet these monuments look strangely unfamiliar to the contemporary eye. Maybe because their surroundings have completely changed. Most mysteriously, Delhi is a city of great crowds, but no crowd is to be seen in these bleak, beautiful images. The captions to the individual photos however are entertainingly eclectic. The baoli at Hazrat Nizamuddin\u2019s Dargah is described as \u201cjumping well.\u201d<\/p>\n
To an extent, the book echoes the work of a photographer from another great city. French lensman Eug\u00e8ne Atget (1857-1927) is best known for creating a visual record of old Paris and was termed an \u201cobsessed photographer\u201d by a biographer.\u201d H.A. Mirza & Sons concentrated only on Delhi\u2019s timeless monuments, ignoring the changing world of its dynamic streets and people. Even so, this book is a rare visual record of our city before it irreversibly changed, and thus a prized relic.<\/p>\n
PS: In the photo, the postcards surrounding the book were acquired years ago from a curio store in Hauz Khas Village.<\/p>\n
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