Descriptions of the Egyptian Court erected in the Crystal Palace by Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi, and eleven others.

CRYSTAL PALACE (aka GREAT EXHIBITION) Descriptions of the Egyptian Court erected in the Crystal Palace by Owen Jones and Joseph Bonomi with an historical notice of the monuments of Egypt by Samuel Sharpe, 71pp * The Greek Court. 113pp * An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court, 56pp * The Roman Court, ii 86pp * The Alhambra Court, 119pp, * The Nineveh Court, 80pp * The Byzantine and Romanesque Court, 116pp * The Mediæval Court, 123pp * The Renaissance Court, 108pp * The Italian Court, 91pp * The Pompeian Court, 73pp * Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park by Samuel Phillips, 193pp. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854 (the last volume 1856). TWELVE volumes bound as three, each of the dozen titles with a colored pictorial printed front wrapper, folding frontispiece, and profusely illustrated (including additional folding plates). 8vo, 3/4 leather (scuffed), marbled boards (exterior worn, internally near-fine).
Individually issued as part of the Crystal Palace Library series, rarely does one find such a large collection of these small titles bound together detailing the specific contents of each division. The Crystal Palace was a cast iron and plate glass structure, originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. After the exhibition, the Palace was relocated to an area of South London known as Penge Place which had been excised from Penge Common. It was rebuilt at the top of Penge Peak next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent suburb of large villas. It stood there from June 1854 until its destruction by fire in November 1936. The nearby residential area was renamed Crystal Palace after the landmark. The park still contains Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins's Crystal Palace Dinosaurs which date back to 1854.