The Book of Ser Marco Polo (First Edition)

POLO, Marco. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian, Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East. Newly translated and edited, with notes, by Colonel Henry Yule. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1871.

8vo. Full contemporary tree calf. Gilt margins to covers. Spines titled in gilt on brown morocco panels with five raised bands and gilt-decorated compartments. Edges and endpapers marbled. Vol. I: clxi, 407 pp.; Vol. II: xviii, 525 pp. Woodcut frontispiece and folding illustration "The Ruc's Egg" tipped into front pastedown of Vol. I; 4 fold-out plates; numerous illustrations, diagrams, maps, and charts throughout both volumes. First edition. From the private libraries of Milton Whitmont and Edward E. Whitmont.

Marco Polo's account of his journeys through Asia in the last decades of the thirteenth century remained for centuries the most detailed and widely read European description of the civilisations of the east. Yule's edition of 1871 was a different order of achievement from previous translations: a work of sustained Oriental scholarship that did not merely render Polo's text into English but provided it with an apparatus of annotations, maps, and commentary that correlated his medieval place names with their present-day identities and traced his routes with a precision no predecessor had managed. The result earned Yule the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and established him as the leading figure in English-language Polo scholarship. The work was so well received that Yule began revising it for a second edition almost immediately after publication; the first edition is consequently scarce.

The illustrations are a significant part of the scholarly apparatus: maps of Polo's routes, diagrams of curiosities described in the text, and the remarkable folding illustration of "The Ruc's Egg" in Vol. I — the great mythical bird of the Indian Ocean, whose egg Polo measured and reported on with the characteristic blend of the credulous and the exact that makes him such a remarkable narrator. The notes throughout are often as absorbing as the text.

Provenance: Present are the bookplates of Milton Whitmont and Edward C. Whitmont. Edward Christopher Whitmont (1912–1998) was a Viennese-born physician and psychotherapist who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and built a distinguished American career as one of the founding members of the C.G. Jung Institute in New York, where he practised Jungian analysis and homeopathy for over fifty years.

Very good. Bindings tight in both volumes. Rubbing and wear to spine of Vol. I with loss of lower morocco plate. Some rubbing to corners of both volumes. Contents complete and generally excellent. Some foxing to prelims of both volumes. Folding illustration "The Ruc's Egg" in front pastedown of Vol. I complete but toned and separated at some seams.

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Catalogue Number: HH000117