The Arabian Nights Entertainments (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

BURTON, Sir Richard (trans.; notes Henry Torrens, Edward Lane & John Payne; illus. Arthur Szyk). The Arabian Nights Entertainments. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1981.

Large, thick octavo. Full navy blue leather. Spine with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design and lettering to covers. All edges gilt. Navy blue moiré endpapers. Navy blue satin ribbon page marker. Illustrations by Arthur Szyk throughout. Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written series. Originally published as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, privately printed [London]: Benares [Kamashastra Society Press], 1885–88.

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) was one of the most extraordinary figures of the Victorian age: soldier, explorer, linguist, diplomat, poet, swordsman, anthropologist, and spy. He was fluent in twenty-nine languages and a number of dialects, and, famously, disguised himself as an Afghan Muslim to make the pilgrimage to Mecca (one of the first non-Muslims to do so). His translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, privately printed in sixteen volumes between 1885 and 1888 with a ten-volume supplement to follow, was the culminating scholarly achievement of his career: a translation of the complete Arabian Nights text from the Arabic, accompanied by extensive explanatory notes on the manners, customs, and beliefs of the Islamic world that drew on three decades of direct observation and study. It was also, for the period, scandalous — Burton translated the text with an explicitness that no previous English translator had attempted, on the grounds that the text warranted it and that scholarly completeness required it, and he published it by private subscription precisely to avoid the censorship that open publication would have invited.

The Arabian Nights — or Alf Layla wa Layla (One Thousand and One Nights) — is not a single text with a single author but an anthology of stories assembled over many centuries from Arabic, Persian, Indian, and other sources, and shaped by generations of copyists, editors, and storytellers. The frame narrative is among the most ingeniously devised in world literature: Scheherazade, married to the murderous King Shahryar who kills each wife on the morning after the wedding night, survives by telling a story each night and stopping at the most compelling point, so that the king must keep her alive to hear the ending. The stories she tells — Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Aladdin, the tales of Haroun al-Rashid — have been in continuous circulation in European culture since Antoine Galland's French translation of 1704 brought them to Western readers, and they have never lost their power.

The illustrations are by Arthur Szyk (1894–1951), the Polish-born American illuminator and miniaturist whose intricate, jewel-like visual interpretations of the text — influenced by Persian miniature painting and medieval illuminated manuscripts — are among the most distinguished visual responses to the material in any Western edition.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000381