The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments.

BURTON, Richard F.

Item Number: 126489

The manuscript edition of Burton’s great work. Quarto, 16 volumes, original full red morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, elaborate ornamental arabesque decorations to the front and rear panels within triple gilt ruling, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt with others uncut, title pages printed in red and black, photogravure frontispieces in 2 states, illustrated with photogravure plates with red-captioned tissue-guards. One of ninety-nine numbered sets, this is number 41. In fine condition. This set is without the leaf of manuscript included in this edition. 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).