Why it matters

Russell's folio is the first published work devoted to the snakes of India, produced after his appointment as botanist to the East India Company in the Carnatic, and it grew out of a practical public-health aim — giving residents a reliable way to tell venomous species from harmless ones. It is also a landmark of late-Georgian colour-plate natural history, printed by William Bulmer for George Nicol. The plates are hand-coloured and life-scaled, and the experiments on the "several poisons" are built right into the title. Russell drew heavily on Indian snake-handlers' knowledge and then tested it, and the book stands behind the naming of Russell's viper (Daboia russelii); auction cataloguers cite it under the standard references Nissen ZBI 3539 and Wood p. 547. The catch is that this copy lives in New Delhi and can't leave India.

Why we're looking

A complete-sounding first-edition folio of the foundational book on Indian snakes, in a decorative half binding with gilt edges, offered by a long-established Delhi antiquarian house rather than a Western colour-plate specialist — the kind of channel where significant natural-history folios sometimes surface outside the usual market. Relative value is unconfirmed because the price is on request: the nearest real benchmarks we found are a comparable first edition sold at Bonhams for £3,500 including premium in 2018 and a Sotheby's copy (bound with the 1801 Continuation) estimated at £3,000–5,000 in 2023, so the seller's figure should be asked for and measured against those.

Watch out for

The seller's own 'Exportable: No' note is the dominant issue — India's Antiquities and Art Treasures Act, 1972 regulates export of material over a hundred years old, so a buyer outside India should establish exactly what that means for delivery before going further. The listing's plate description (46 plates on 45 sheets, 2 uncoloured) differs slightly from the auction cataloguing we found, where both the Bonhams and Sotheby's copies are described with three plain plates; worth asking which plates are coloured and confirming all 46 are present and clean. Stated foxing, creasing and rubbed edges are modest, but the listing does not give a text collation or say whether the binding is period or later, and no price is published.