Home / Browse / Travel & Exploration / Travels in Arabia Deserta.
DOUGHTY, Charles M.
Travels in Arabia Deserta.
With a New Preface by the Author, Introduction by T.E. Lawrence …
Publisher: Philip Lee Warner, publisher to the Medici Society, Ltd., and Jonathan Cape, 1921
Stock code: 73540
Price: £3,500 Currency Conversion
First published in 1888, this is the second edition, the first with Doughty's new preface, and Lawrence's introduction, one of 500 copies only. "Travels in Arabia Deserta, on which Doughty laboured from 1879 to 1884 and which he continued correcting until its publication in 1888, is an unrivalled encyclopaedia of knowledge about all aspects of nineteenth-century and earlier Arabia. In a notable contemporary review in Academy, Sir Richard Francis Burton praised the book's scientific knowledge and its style... So reliable was the book's anthropology of the Bedouin peoples and its topography, that British intelligence mined it for information during the First and Second World wars. Doughty's contributions to all areas of Arabian knowledge continue to be praised by scholars" (Stephen Tabachnik in ODNB). Lawrence had long admired Doughty's work and was instrumental in getting it republished by Jonathan Cape, it was to be the publisher's first book, "Lawrence's notoriety was desired for the expensive two volume set [it was published at 9 guineas, somewhere over £1000 today] and he was persuaded to write his first introduction" (O'Brien). This is Norman Douglas's copy with a one-page letter signed from Jonathan Cape soliciting a review from the London Mercury - Douglas reviewed the book in May, 1921 - and a wonderful two-page autograph letter signed from Doughty to Douglas; "Dear Sir, It would always give me pleasure to see you, a friend of Mr. Edward Garnett, if anything should bring you this way; & to talk over literary subjects … I have never contributed anything to Periodical Literature. The Arabia Deserta vols. … & succeeding volumes … have occupied every hour of my time & strength, year in & year out without intermission for 55 years, nearly. To help on, what I believe to be a sane English Philology; has been my lifelong endeavour & personal form of Patriotism." In his review Douglas remarks on the philosophical, rather than the documentary, aspect of Doughty's work; "It seems to me that the reader of a good travel-book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage … but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with that outer one; and that the ideal book of the kind offers us, indeed, a triple opportunity of exploration — abroad, into the author's brain, and into our own. The writer should therefore possess a brain worth exploring; some philosophy of life … and the courage to proclaim it and put it to the test; he must be naif and profound, both child and sage." Douglas's pencilled page-notes to the versos of the original rear free endpapers, which have been retained, laid down on Japanese tissue, and bound in at the end of volume I, occasional pencil marks to the margins. An excellent association copy of this uncommon work,
2 volumes octavo (219 × 140 mm). Handsomely bound by The Chelsea Bindery in dark green full morocco, title gilt to the spines, raised bands with dotted roll, single panel gilt to the compartments and boards, single gilt edge-roll, top edge gilt, the others uncut, twin gilt rules to turn-ins, black endpapers. Photogravure portrait frontispiece and 9 other plates, 6 of them folding, large folding coloured map in an end-pocket to volume I, illustrations to the text throughout, many full-page. Light browning else very good.
