This little album of the relatively recently opened (1828) London Zoo, includes both charming images of well-caged birds and monkeys, and more alarming ones of the more dangerous animals almost free-range, and in too close proximity to polite society. It was the most successful of Scharf's publications, and his most rare. The imprint on the title-page leaves the exact year of issue open-ended and is supplied in manuscript. Here, the date is given as 183"5", the year in which the album was first issued, and the date of the imprints on each plate. The final plate is of the infamous Chimps' Tea Party. A seventh plate was issued a year later, showing 'The Giraffes, with the Arabs who brought them over to this county'.

Originally from Bavaria, George Johann Scharf (1788–1860), was caught up in the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, and even saw action at Waterloo. By 1816, he was in London, and one of a very few artists with any knowledge of lithography. "He was befriended by the lithographic printer Charles Hullmandel, who gave him one of his first commissions, a view of the coronation procession of George IV in 1821. However, his main source of income was as an illustrator for scientific journals, for example, the 'Transactions of the Zoological Society of London' and the 'Transactions of the Geological Society', and he was employed by Sir Richard Owen and Charles Darwin, who appreciated his meticulous attention to detail and his painstaking accuracy" (Jackson).

The plates were lithographed by Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789–1850), who would become the finest, and most prolific, lithographic printer in Britain of his day, having met Alois Senefelder, the inventor of the technique, in Paris in 1818. Most of the major improvements made to lithography in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s can be attributed to him. In 1835, he printed the colour plates for Hoskins's 'Travels in Ethiopia' (1835), the first of their kind to be published in Britain.

Rare: Only one other example has appeared in commerce in the last fifty years; institutional examples found only at the Royal Society, and Northwestern University, USA