Arabian Nights: Their Best-Known Tales.

MAXFIELD PARRISH, Illustrator; Edited by Kate Wiggins and Nora A. Smith.

Item Number: 4155

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909.

First edition. Octavo, original black cloth. Illustrated by Maxfield Parrish with 12 color plates. In near fine condition, without the usual wear to front panel. A nice bright copy.

Arabian Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Indian, Turkish, Egyptian and Mesopotamian folklore and literature. Some of the stories of The Nights, particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" and "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", while almost certainly genuine Middle-Eastern folk tales. The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems. Numerous stories depict Jinns, Ghouls, Apes, sorcerers, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally. The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble.