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BADDELEY, John F.
The Rugged Flanks of Caucasus.
Publisher: London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1940
Stock code: 51070
Price: £3,000 Currency Conversion
First edition. Baddeley's career began as a South American correspondent on the Observer, but around 1873 a meeting at a family dinner party with Count Shuvalov, the Russian Ambassador, permanently shifted his course. Taken by the Count as his guest to St. Petersburg, he soon - with Shuvalov's recommendation - became Special Correspondent to the Standard; "his knowledge of the language and his access to sources of information in the highest Russian circles which were available to no other Englishman in Russia materially helped to enhance the reputation of his paper. " (Charles Hagberg Wright's memoir.) For the next sixty years he travelled widely, and immersed himself in the study of his adopted country; "In the unexplored regions of Manchuria and of Asiatic and Southern Russia… Baddeley became familiar with the manners and customs of the people of the various races around him as well as with the ethnology and archaeology of these regions. These journeys enabled him to gather together a mass of information from hitherto entirely unexplored sources." A model for studies of its kind, this is a beautifully produced book. Issued at 6 guineas during the second year of the War, the paper and binding cloth are of the highest quality, and the gravures reproducing Baddeley's drawings and photographs are superb. Extremely uncommon in jackets.
2 volumes, quarto. Original dark sand, flecked buckram, titles gilt to spines, top edge trimmed others uncut. In the dust jackets. Photogravure portrait frontispiece to each and 35 other similar plates in all, 9 maps, all but one folding. Spines very slightly sunned, corners mildly bumped, but overall an excellent set in slightly rubbed and frayed, but almost entirely complete jackets.
