The Road to Oxiana.

BYRON, Robert.

$1,500.00

Item Number: 111765

London: Macmillan & Company, 1937.

First edition of the author’s masterpiece. Octavo, original cloth, frontispiece, 15 plates and a map. From the library of Henry Alexander Nesbitt Medd. Medd, who was an architect and best-known for his collaboration with fellow architects, Edwin Luytens and Herbert Baker, in designing New Delhi. He remained in India and in 1939-47 held the role of Chief Architect to the Indian Government. Medd’s ownership inscription is on the front free endpaper, there is also the bookplate of Gavin Stamp on the front pastedown, who notes that it was a gift from Medd. Stamp reviewed the Picador edition of this work for the Spectator in 1981 and a photocopy of his review is included. In very good condition. A nice example with noted provenance.

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."