Travels in Arabia Deserta (Folio Society Limited Deluxe Edition)

DOUGHTY, Charles M. (preface Rory Stewart; intro. T. E. Lawrence; illus. Félix Bonfils et al.; marbled paper Jemma Lewis). Travels in Arabia Deserta. London: The Folio Society, 2013. 3 vols. (2 text vols. & map portfolio).

Large Octavo. Both text volumes half-bound in Indian goatskin by Lachenmaier, Reutlingen, Germany, with marbled paper sides by Jemma Lewis. Spines lettered in gilt. Top edges gilt. Light brown endpapers. Text printed on wove paper. Approximately 200 integrated illustrations throughout; 52 pages of duotone plates printed on art silk paper, mainly after photographs by Félix Bonfils and others. Map volume: large folding coloured map of Doughty's route, mounted in panels on linen and case-bound in Arbelave library buckram; limitation statement on front pastedown. Dark brown buckram slipcase with gilt-lettered morocco title-label to spine. Vol. I: lii, 610 pp; Vol. II: xvi, 644 pp. Limited deluxe edition. Limited to 780 numbered copies for sale (plus 20 lettered copies not for sale), this being number 159. Originally published Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888. Originally published at £495.

Charles Montagu Doughty (1843–1926) spent twenty-one months in the Arabian Peninsula between 1876 and 1878, travelling with Bedouin tribes through the Hejaz and Nejd in conditions of intermittent danger, poverty, and extraordinary physical beauty. He was an Englishman and a Christian in a country inhospitable to both, and he survived through a combination of stubbornness, medical knowledge, and the particular protection extended to him by individual Bedouin who chose, against the customs of the region, to keep him alive. He carried no camera. He made drawings and diagrams and notes. He returned home and spent the next ten years writing the book his experience had produced.

Travels in Arabia Deserta was published by Cambridge University Press in 1888 in an edition so small it nearly vanished. It was rescued from obscurity by T. E. Lawrence, who tracked down one of the few surviving copies and understood immediately that it was among the greatest books in the English language. Lawrence wrote of it: "I have read everything written in English, and some things written in other languages, about the Near East. Nothing approaches it." He was instrumental in securing a second edition in 1921, to which he contributed the introduction reprinted in this Folio Society edition, and it was through Lawrence's advocacy that the book found the audience it deserved.

What Lawrence recognised was the simultaneity of Doughty's achievement: a work of travel literature, natural history, ethnography, geology, archaeology, and linguistics — written in a deliberate archaic prose that invokes Chaucer and Spenser and the King James Bible, and that creates, through its strangeness, something of the foreignness and grandeur of the landscape it describes. The forty-eight pages of photographs by Félix Bonfils and other early photographers, included in this edition, supply what Doughty himself could not provide — visual documentation of the Arabia he moved through — though, as the Folio Society edition notes, the desert interior was left to Doughty's prose alone: Bonfils's cameras did not venture there.

The map that accompanies the text volumes is the map Doughty himself drafted during his travels and presented to the Royal Geographical Society on his return — a document of geographical discovery as well as literary biography.

Near fine. Mild foxing along edges of volumes; all contents present, bright, and clear throughout.

Please note: This item is a large and very heavy three-component set. Additional postage costs will apply. Please contact us for a shipping quote before purchase.

This book is currently not on display in store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000582