Around the World with General Grant.

GRANT, Ulysses S.

Item Number: 139579

New York City: The American News Company, 1879.

First edition of Young’s illustrated narrative of Grant’s international travel. Quartos, two volumes bound in three quarters morocco over pebbled leatherette boards, gilt titles and elaborate gilt tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, marbled endpapers, all edges marbled, tissue-guarded engraved frontispiece portrait of Grant, illustrated with engravings both full page and within the text. In near fine condition. An exceptional example.

After leaving the office of the presidency in 1877, Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a journey worthy of his legendary namesake, an around-the-world tour that took him from Europe to the Middle East and Asia over two and one-half years. Accompanying Grant was journalist John Russell Young, a wartime associate who was working in Europe as a correspondent for the New York Herald when Grant first arrived in England. On assignment for the Herald, Young joined the former president's entourage and faithfully recorded every detail of the grand tour -- the sightseeing, official visits, travel conditions, and Grant's candid discussions with heads of state and other notables about the Civil War and other matters of state. So far from home, Grant felt free to speak his mind about his fellow Union officers, his Confederate adversaries, and the conduct of the war, at far more length than he would in his celebrated but close-to-the-vest memoirs. These salty reminiscences of the war give this travelogue its greatest importance for posterity.