The Voiage And Trauaile Of Syr John Maundevile Knight, Which Treateth Of The Way Toward Hierusalem, And Of Marvayles Of Inde With Other Ilands And Countryes. Mandeville, Sir John:

Limited edition, no. 21 of 350 copies printed. Octavo. Publisher's original cream paper-covered boards with titles in black to the spine, in the original marbled-paper covered card slipcase with printed paper title label. Top edge gilt, the others untrimmed. Illustrated throughout with black and white woodcuts. 254pp. A near fine copy, the binding square and tight with some light dust-soiling to the spine and board edges. The contents with a little toning to the endpapers are otherwise wonderfully clean and crisp throughout. The slipcase with a little marking and spotting is otherwise in very good order. An account of the fourteenth-century eastern travels by (the probably fictitious) Sir John Mandeville, who journeyed across the Islamic world as far as India and China, traversing Turkey, Tartary, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, Chaldea, and "the land of the Amazons". Providing a highly entertaining guide for pilgrims to the Holy Land, the work certainly carried the reader far off course, often presenting more fantasy than fact, but still containing geographical details to lend it credence. Indeed, "Mandeville's book whetted the Western European reader's appetite for the travel book as a journal of marvels: dry scientific detail was not what these readers wanted. Rather it was imagination plus information." (Carter and McRae, Routledge History of Literature in English, p.25). It thus became the prototype in English of the popular genre of the fabulous travel book, and came to form an important influence on subsequent English writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The present edition is "reprinted from the English edition of 1568, with the addition, in square brackets, of the long passage (Chapter XII, pp.48-72) omitted from all early editions and most manuscripts and first printed in 1725 from the Cotton Manuscript in the British Museum". An uncommonly nice copy of this attractively produced edition, complete with its original slipcase.