The Road to Oxiana.

BYRON, Robert.

Item Number: 111475

London: Macmillan & Company, 1937.

First edition of the author’s masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth, frontispiece, 15 plates and a map. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Ted Fletcher with pleasant memories of Kabul from Robert Byron.” The recipient, was Major Fletcher, a member of the British Legion in Kabul in the late 1930s and early 1940s, acting as a war military attache and intelligence officer. Fletcher is mentioned in this volume by Byron that the Major had driven him out to see Dar-al-Aman and Paghman on an excursion from Kabul. Near fine in a very good dust jacket with some rubbing and wear to the extremities. Rare in the original dust jacket and with such an association.

In 1933, the delightfully eccentric travel writer Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana, near the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Throughout, he kept a thoroughly captivating record of his encounters, discoveries, and frequent misadventures. His story would become a best-selling travel book throughout the English-speaking world, until the acclaim died down and it was gradually forgotten. When Paul Fussell published his own book Abroad, in 1982, he wrote that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry."