The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

BURTON, Richard F.

Item Number: 90432

Limited Teheran Subscribers edition of Burton’s great work. Octavo, 17 volumes. Bound in three quarters green morocco over silk-covered boards with gilt titles and tooling to the spine including red morocco crescent onlays and gilt arabesques in three compartments within raised gilt bands, top edge gilt, others uncut, marbled endpapers. Each volume illustrated with tissue-guarded engraving including frontispiece. One of only one thousand numbered copies, this is number 331. In near fine condition. An exceptional set.

Richard Burton was an accomplished geographer, explorer, orientalist, ethnologist, diplomat, polylinguist and author who is best known for his translation of Arabian Nights. One of the great Arabists of his day, he had long wanted to publish an unexpurgated version of the "Arabian Nights" stories. The first translations into English, notably that by Edward Lane (1840, 1859), were highly abridged. In translating the Nights, Burton "attempted to invent an English equivalent of medieval Arabic. In doing so, he drew upon Chaucerian English, Elizabethan English, and the 1653 English translation by Sir Thomas Urquhart of the first three books of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel" (Byatt).