Earlier, texts were illustrated by pictures; today photographs are more often supplemented by texts. This book is a collection of very beautiful photographs of the better-known monuments of Delhi, by a well-known photographer. It is not a guide-book, for it lacks the professionalism of one—no map, no index, no chronological chart (which is necessary in a book written entirely in terms of the various rules of Delhi), no bibliography.
‘There is hardly another forty-five square miles of ground on earth of more interest to the students of history than that which had supplied the material is of this work’ wrote Carr Stephen in his Archaeology and Monumental Remains of Delhi in 1876.
In the century that followed, more books about Delhi were published, though many of them merely served up the old material in a new format. Percival Spear’s delightful little book on Delhi published in 1946 was the last guidebook to show the familiarity with the subject that comes from having walked over the territory.