From Albert Einstein's visit to Shanghai to General Chiang Kai Shek's tussle with the Soviet agent Mikhail Borodin and the outrage at attempts to restrict the city's notorious nightlife, however grave and political his themes, Sapajou's sophisticated cartoons are charged with an unusual restraint and his acerbic characterizations. Tales of Old Shanghai by Graham Earnshaw, who is also the founder-editor of Earnshaw Books, is a captivating collage of archival images (cartoons, sepia-tinted photographs, advertisement, picture postcards, maps, newspaper clippings, book covers, bank notes, cinema posters) and words (extracts from a 19th-century trader's letter to the British consul, JG Ballard's novel Empire of The Sun, Fortune magazine's article on Shanghai in 1935, a tip on how to pronounce "Bund", lucid, pithy write-ups on Indians in Shanghai and Sir Victor Sassoon).

The company has also repackaged and published several books on Shanghai history that are out of circulation, with fresh introductions. These include the American entrepreneur and adventurer Carl Crow's books, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, 1940 and 400 Million Customers, 1937. Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911 and stayed 25 years, setting up a newspaper and China's first Western-style advertising agency, compiling acquired wisdom that he published for the benefit of fellow foreigners in the Middle Kingdom.

"Carl Crow had a real love and appreciation of Chinese culture, he wrote anecdotal guides to China for outsiders which are just as applicable today," says Sandhaus. "For example in 400 Million Customers he writes that Shanghai is the only port city in the world that doesn't have seagulls."

It still doesn't.

By Chitralekha Basu

Editor: Feng Hui