The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

Richard Burton's The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; One of a 1000 copies

The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.

BURTON, Richard F.

Item Number: 100392

Finely bound set of Burton’s The Book of the the Thousands Nights, limited set, number 846 of 1000 copies. Octavo, 17 volumes bound in three quarters leather, gilt titles and ruling to the spine, raised bands, marbled endpapers, illustrated with numerous gravure plates from etchings, drawings and paintings. In near fine condition.

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).

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