Victoria Painting Book, issued in connection with a 1897 painting contest for British children. Very rare unused edition The blatantly patriotic - and brightly chromolithographed - cover of the book depicts a Boer War veteran having returned home, his helmet tossed on the ground, and his daughter sitting on his lap reading to him, with his sailor-suited son standing next to them, holding a large Union Jack.   One facing pair of illustrations inside the book - captioned \"Home Again\" - depicts the happy moment of the veteran\'s homecoming to his family.  (The girl\'s abruptly-dropped doll hitting the floor and the child\'s drawing hanging on the wall add a couple of nice touches to the family reunion, which a great many families did not get to savor, due to heavy casualties in the Boer War\'s protracted fighting.) But most of the subject matter in the book - combining facing chromolithographs and uncoloured versions to paint with alphabet rhymes - is not about patriotism or warfare, but about sick or injured children and the Victoria Hospital for Children, which the book was printed to benefit, as noted on the foot of the cover. Accordingly, most of the illustrations depict injured children (with a sentimentality that would have made Dickens proud) or children in the hospital, injured or sick to be sure, but looking surprisingly happy against the backdrop of a very, very neat and tidy, altogether impressive-looking hospital with caring nurses.  \"The stately old home is now a children\'s hospital: the rooms are full of cots, each with its tiny sick child, and up and down go the nurses, busy with their work. It takes a lot of money to build such a hospital\" (in the words of the accompanying two-page \"Victoria Hospital Story\" in the book). Who wouldn\'t be moved to buy a book or donate money to support such a wonderful, caring institution for children? The Victoria Painting Book was issued so that its sales proceeds might benefit the children\'s hospital.  The text of the book itself also asks child-readers to raise money themselves (\"If each child who reads this book would collect twelve pennies towards it, that would go some way to pay for bricks and stones and mortar\").  As if that\'s not enough fund-raising inspiration, the book also advertises a painting competition on several pages inside, whereby children are solicited to \"tear out\" and mail in a completed version of the Prize Competition Picture from the book (a Christmas scene at the end), along with ten shillings (presumably in cash), in hopes of winning £5, 2£, or 1£ prizes.  I have to wonder how many books were discarded after the picture and required entry form pages were torn out, the book perhaps fell apart as a result, and other pictures were coloured in.  Perhaps that\'s one reason why it\'s so rare now?