Buenos Aires, Guillermo Kraft, 1943-1956. Folio (49.3 x 34.3 cm), five volumes in seven. With, in total, 1936 pages of text and 811 fine plates [149, 175, 133, 221, 133], of which 141 [20, 26, 54, 22, 19] printed in full colour and tissue-guarded. Original uniform decorated green cloth, with floral patterns on spine and blind-stamped tooling on boards. Pictorial (floral) endpapers. All edges red.

A magnificent, massive set, one of the largest botanical publications known, and rarely seen complete. The trustees of the Miguel Lillo Foundation in Tucumán, who financed the publication, requested that Humboldt and Bonpland's Voyage aux régions équinoxales du Nouveau Continent was to be used as a model for the publication of this work. The commission resulted in this remarkable, profusely illustrated set. It is regarded both in size and in content as the major work on the flora of Argentina, which led UNESCO to put it on the list of the most important contributions to world knowledge in the 20th century. This copy shows the set in all its beauty, with all volumes in their very decorative illustrated cloth bindings. Fine, clean copies of all parts are rare - the fifth volume seems to be the rarest. The editor and main author, Horacio Raúl Descole (1910-1984) was an Argentine pharmacist and botanist. He studied medicine and biochemistry at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1937 he became head of the department of botany of the Natural History Museum of the University of Tucumán (northwestern Argentina). He was the founder of the botanical journal Lilloa and worked as director of the library of the Miguel Lillo Institute. Between 1946 and 1951 he was rector of the University of Tucumán. In 1955 he fled to Rancagua, Chili, because of a military uprising. In 1973 he returned after which he worked as rector of the University of Tucumán and began with the establishing of the current Sierra San Javier Park. This series of magnificently illustrated botanical monographs, however, was never continued. All full-colour plates are tissue-guarded. The plain plates are either printed in black, or in sepia, green, or brown, sometimes in combination with black. All distribution maps are partly coloured to indicate different distribution patterns of related plants; a small section of plates are photographical, and show trees and other plants in their natural habitat. The plants are treated by family or higher taxa (e.g., the Cactae), and described by various botanists. Some, mostly light wear to spine ends; otherwise an attractive set, hardly worn and contents very clean. Nissen BBI, 470N. Not in Stafleu and Cowan.