Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Miscellaneous Information Connected with the Persian Gulf, Bombay Government Records. First Edition. Bombay: Printed for the Government at the Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1856.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Original green cloth, paper labels to the spine, and front board. Housed in a plush-lined leather-entry marbled paper slipcase. 6 folding lithographic maps including the very large (580 × 922 mm) area map – “Map of Maritime Arabia with the Opposite Coasts of Africa and Persia reduced from an Original Map by T. Dickinson, Chief Engineer, lithographed in the Chief Engineer’s Office by Huskeljee E, and Kumroondeen E., Bombay 1st March 1856” – coastline outlined in blue, loose in pocket inside the front board and consequently often lacking; together with the “Sketch of Rasool Khymah ”, with hand-colour; “Plan of Bassadore Roads by H.H. Hewett, Midshipman”, similar “Trigonometrical Plan of the Harbour of Grane or Koweit” and “Sketch of the Island of Kenn”, and a large “Reduced Copy of Chart of the Gulf of Persia”, uncoloured; and a folding letterpress census table.
Some very light shelf-wear, spine sunned to brown, and some differential sunning on the boards, Ex-Bath Public Library with the S. B. Miles legacy bookplate in the map pocket, their discreet blind-stamps to the other maps, light toning, one gathering slightly loose, but overall an exception copy, superbly preserved.
First edition of this remarkable, historically important digest of information relating to the Persian Gulf, with particular attention paid to the Trucial States, now the United Arab Emirates: “This volume is a collection of reports received by the Government of Bombay and was designed to serve as a reference book for officers working in the area … Anyone working on the nineteenth-century history of Eastern Arabia and the Gulf comes across frequent references to it … It served as a basic source for Lorimer in his Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia. It contains, however, a great deal more information that Lorimer omitted, presumably for reasons of space. The history of Abu Dhabi which Lorimer dealt with in just over four pages here receives thirty-four” (Robin Bidwell in his introduction to the 1985 reprint).
The period covered was key to the historical development to the region. From the early part of the 19th century, the operations of the Wahhabist Qawasim’s “holy war by sea” on what the British referred to as the “Pirate Coast” had much hindered the use of the overland “Desert Mail” to communicate vital despatches to and from Britain’s burgeoning Indian empire. When a British ship was “captured less than 70 miles from Bombay” in 1818, it was the final straw and a force was sent out to suppress the “pirates” for once and for all. The expedition was a great success, resulting in the capture of Ras al-Khaimah and the other key Qawasim strongholds, and in 1830 with the conclusion of the General Treaty of Peace, binding the local shaikhs to abjure “plunder and piracy”. “However, the British realised that the future security of the Gulf would depend less upon a piece of paper than upon the vigour with which they enforced it. A permanent presence would have to be maintained and to act as policemen both topographical and background knowledge have always been required: the papers printed in this volume were designed to provide this for the men on the spot and for their masters in Bombay”. In this context, the first paper is of particular historiographical interest being Captain Robert Taylor’s compilation of all the then available reliable information on the region, as a sort of “invasion handbook” for the 1819 expedition.
This copy was part of the bequest of the widow of Colonel Samuel Barrett Miles to Bath Public Libraries. For 14 years, Miles was one of the “men of the spot”, serving successively as Political Agent in Turkish Arabia, Consul-General in Baghdad, Political Agent and Consul in Zanzibar, and Political Resident in the Gulf. In his obituary in the Geographical Journal Miles was commended for his “unrivalled knowledge of the Arab … few political officers anywhere have brought to their work such a profound knowledge of orientalism and such indefatigable energy and patience in collecting vast stores of information by personal research or observation”. An outstanding provenance for what is a superb copy of this highly elusive, foundational text for the study of the Gulf in the modern era. It is difficult to imagine a better copy.
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Historiae, in Greek, Herodotus. Editio Princeps First Edition. Aldus Manutius, September 1502.
You can view our first edition of Historiae, in Greek here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Folio (318 x 204 mm), 140 leaves, complete. Nineteenth-century blindstamped pigskin with Aldine device on sides, modern labels on spine, red speckled edges. Text in Greek and Latin, Aldine device on title and final leaf. Title and last leaf lightly soiled, tiny marginal wormhole in final 40 leaves, still an excellent copy, with early marginal annotations in Greek (some just trimmed), and with the later bookplates of Girolamo d’Adda (1815-1881) and Livio Ambrogio.
Editio princeps of Herodotus’ history of the Persian Wars, one of the most important texts edited by the great scholar-printer-publisher himself. Herodotus had first been published in Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translation. Aldus claims in the dedication that he corrected the text from multiple exemplars, one of the few instances where such a claim by him is justified and can be verified. He was the first to have access to the “Florentine” codices, where Valla had used the so-called Roman family of manuscripts for his translation.
The printer’s copy was discovered in Nuremberg by Brigitte Mondrain in 1993 (Scriptorium 49 , pp. 263-273). The Herodotus was designed to match the Aldine Thucydides of four months earlier: they share a paper stock, all types and the number of lines per page.
“Certainly for the war itself his authority forms the basis of all modern histories; and, more than that, it is the stuff of legends. Herodotus is far more than a valuable source: always readable, his work has been quoted and translated ever since” (PMM).
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Guys and Dolls, Damon Runyon. First Edition, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1931.
You can view our first edition of Guys and Dolls here.
Presented by Adam Blakeney, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
Octavo. Original red cloth, spine and front board lettered in gilt. With the dust jacket. Housed in a custom black cloth solander box with printed paper label to spine and elaborate cloth onlay reproducing the jacket design to the front board. Extremities very slightly rubbed as usual, edges toned with a few faint spots, the cloth and lettering bright and fresh. An excellent copy in the rubbed, toned and slightly nicked dust jacket, chipped at joints and spine-ends to minor loss of lettering and with the joint between front panel and flap split from the bottom edge to about halfway.
First edition, first printing. Scarce in any condition, and extremely so thus: this is the only the second copy we have handled, and the first in the dust jacket, with just seven jacketed copies in auction records dating back to 1958.
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
https://youtube.com/watch?v=W1pxN6SX6dM
A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson. First Edition London: by W. Strahan, for J. and P. Knapton; T. and T. Longman; C. Hitch and L. Hawes; A. Millar; and R. and J. Dodsley, 1755.
You can view our first edition of the Dictionary of the English Language here.
Presented by Sammy Jay, Rare Books Specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
2 volumes, folio (400 × 254 mm). Contemporary spotted full calf, spines elaborately gilt-tooled in compartments with raised bands and tan title labels, red speckled edges.Title page in red and black. Armorial bookplates of W. T. Salvin Esq, of Croxdale Hall, to both copies. Restoration to joints and hinges, some rubbing, small scratches and dents to spine and sides, residual red wax seals to both pastedowns, partial offset tanning from turn-ins, light spotting to some endleaves, leaves lightly cockled throughout but on the whole internally rather fresh, and generally a handsome copy in very good condition.
First edition of this most famous of English dictionaries, in an extremely handsome contemporary binding. The creation of the dictionary was Johnson’s greatest literary labour.
Helped by a succession of needy amanuenses who worked in the surprisingly spacious garret of his house in Gough Square, he experienced the death of his mother and underwent agonies of procrastination before finally completing the task in his 46th year. Boswell called it a work of “superior excellence” and “much greater mental labour, than mere Lexicons, or Word Books as the Dutch call them” (Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript. Vol I: 1709–1765, ed. Marshall Waingrow, Edinburgh, 1994, p. 213).
As his use of 114,000 illustrative quotations shows, Johnson clearly intended to combine lexicography with entertainment and instruction; this was the only work he called “my Book” (Letters I: 71). Since it was now owned by the booksellers who had paid him £1,575 in advance, publication by no means saved him from poverty. Yet it was always to be called “Johnson’s Dictionary” – and was as much his greatest monument as St. Paul’s was Christopher Wren’s. The national pride taken in the dictionary was expressed by the poet Christopher Smart when he wrote in the Universel Visitor: “I look upon with equal amazement, as I do upon St. Paul’s Cathedral; each the work of one man, each the work of an Englishman” (quoted by Henry Hitchings, Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, London, 2005, pp. 199–200).
Jan 27, 2016 | Videos
Bucaniers of America, Alexandre Exquemelin. First Editions London: William Crooke, 1684 & 1685.
You can view our first edition of Bucaniers of America here.
Presented by Adam Douglas, Senior Specialist in Literature at Peter Harrington Rare Books.
2 volumes, small quarto (205 × 160 mm). Late 19th-century red crushed morocco by Bedford, richly gilt spine, three-line gilt border on sides enclosing central gilt panel with floriate corner-pieces, all edges gilt, richly gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers; housed in a custom made fleece-lined red cloth slipcase. The first-named with 4 engraved portraits, 4 engraved plates (1 double-page, 1 folding), engraved double-page map of Panama, allegorical head-piece, and a woodcut; the second with 2 engraved folding maps (one large), 13 full-page engraved maps and charts which are included in the pagination, a full-page engraved city-plan and 42 woodcuts of coastal profiles in the text. Embossed library stamp of Donald Duncan MacDermid on a preliminary binder’s blank. Light bump to back bottom corner, map of South America skilfully repaired (short closed-tear in the margin), last three leaves skilfully remargined at the bottom edge and gutter.
First edition in English of Exquemelin; first edition of Ringrose. These two works together form the primary contemporary source in English for the history of the English and French buccaneers, or more politely “privateers”, who harassed Spanish shipping and colonies in the Caribbean during the 17th century. As Sabin averred, “No book in any language was ever the source of so many imitations, and the source of so many fictions as this.”
A Huguenot native to Honfleur, Exquemelin left France in 1666 as an indentured servant bound for the Antilles. On Tortuga, he was sold to a nefarious government officer, and later resold to a doctor who taught him some of the skills of a barber-surgeon, offered Exquemelin his freedom for a price, and gave him a few surgical tools. By the end of the 1660s, Exquemelin became a flibustier, or privateer. He probably served with Jean-David Nau l’Olonnais, and participated in the raid of Maracaibo in 1669. He later took part in Henry Morgan’s sack of Panama in 1670–71. Soon thereafter, Exquemelin abandoned piracy, returned to Europe, and studied medicine in Amsterdam, where he completed this account. He later returned to America several times as a ship’s surgeon aboard Dutch and Spanish vessels. He writes in considerable detail about raids upon various settlements throughout the West Indies, fights with Indians, encounters with other pirates, and acts of torture committed by the marauding bands upon the region’s inhabitants. Although some of his dates are questionable, Exquemelin’s account is considered among the most reliable of the period.
The second volume, containing Basil Ringrose’s narrative of Bartholomew Sharp’s depredations on the Pacific coast, is similarly prized for its accuracy: “He was … one of five buccaneers, including William Dampier and Lionel Wafer, who kept a journal of the expedition. His narrative is by far the most detailed account of the voyage” (ODNB). Ringrose is also renowned for his capture and copying of the Rosario’s derrotero or waggoner, which contained secret pilotage instructions for the whole of the Pacific coast of America.
It is extremely unusual to find the two volumes together in first editions: “It is more usual to find Volume I of the first edition alone; or Volume I of the second edition combined with Volume II of the first edition” (Church). Exquemelin first appeared in Dutch in 1678, the present edition being translated from Alonso de Buena Maison’s Spanish edition of 1681. A highly desirable volume, particularly so in this lovely binding by one of the foremost London bookbinders of the period.
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