Lot 74
Gladwin, Francis
A Compendious System of Bengal Revenue Accounts
Auction: Books & Manuscripts | 01 October 2026 from 10am | Lots 1 to 78
Description
In Three Parts. Part I […] Putwary Accounts, with a Vocabulary of Revenue Terms. Part the Second. […] Tables of the Christian and Mohammedan Aeras, calculated from the Commencement of the Hejra or, A. D. 622, to A. D. 1900. Part the Third. Calcutta: [part 1] Manuel Cantopher, [part 2] from the Chronicle Press, by Cooper and Upjohn, [part 3] James White, 1790. 3 parts in 1 volume, 8vo (20.7 x 12cm), viii [4] 168, [4] 146, 67 pp., contemporary quarter calf, marbled sides, vellum tips, woodcut ornaments to title-pages of parts 2 and 3, part 1 including siyaq numerals and text in nasta'liq, spine-label perished [ESTC T101075 and Shaw, Printing in Calcutta, 163, both for part 1 only]
Footnote
Very rare: ESTC traces two copies only for the first part (A Compendious System); these first editions of the second and third parts (Putwary Accounts, and Tables of the Christian and Mohammedan Eras) are unrecorded in ESTC and Shaw's Printing in Calcutta to 1800, both of which cite only the second editions of 1794, together with the collected second edition of all three parts, which appeared in 1796.
The work is of typographic importance, containing the first printed example of siyaq, the contracted Arabic script developed for accounting and bureaucratic purposes and ‘usually associated with the Ottomans' (Shaw).