CONSTANT, Samuel Victor.

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Calls, Sounds and Merchandise of the Peking Street Peddlers. First edition, first printing, of this rich record of street life in Republican Beijing written by an American military attaché. Employing candid photographs, colourful drawings, and even musical scores, the work captures the itinerant and human side of Chinese urban economic life in the 1930s - aspects less well recorded in many travel narratives and photobooks.Calls, Sounds and Merchandise details 54 types of pedlar, divided according to the season where they are most active, including the "toy peddler", the "feet fixer", and the intriguingly named "running band boat". The author, Samuel Victor Constant (1894-1989), was a US Army officer and a specialist in Asian languages. In 1924, he was posted to China to serve as a military attaché and, during 12 years in Beijing, he gathered material for the present work. Shortly after his death, it was republished by the Bird & Bull Press in the United States, while a Chinese translation - Jing du jiaomai tu - was released in Beijing in 1994.This is a pleasing survival of Beijing's thriving early 20th-century expatriate cultural milieu. The publisher, the Camel Bell, was a legendary shop based in the Grand Hotel de Pekin and overseen by the American Helen Burton. Her store was popular with Westerners who dropped in to buy silks, furs, curios and art, and Burton appears regularly in many memoirs of Republican Beijing. This copy was sold by the Peking Bookshop, another favouri

• Printing: first

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