Third printing, published in the same year as the first edition, of this important study which took ten years to complete.

Bohrn 637.

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‘ONE OF THE MOST FINELY CRAFTED PUBLICATIONS ON CENTRAL ASIA’ BONVALOT, Gabriel.

Du Caucase aux Indes à travers le Pamir.

First edition. The French orientalist and explorer Bonvalot (1853-1933) made his first expedition into Central Asia in 1880, and undertook a second journey into the area with the artist Pépin and the physician and scientist Guillaume Capus in 1886-1887. In the course of a remarkable expedition, the three travellers crossed Persia, and then from Samarkand they explored the head of the Oxus in the Pamirs and descended to the Indus from the Wakhan Valley through Masutj in Chitral; this expedition earned Bonvalot a gold medal from the Société de géographie de Paris and the title Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur.

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PRE-WAR SINGAPORE [DICKSON, George.

Singapore flight.

Apparently the first and only edition of a fascinating personal diary of an 18,000-mile flight from Southampton to Singapore made in 1938 (pp. 1–36). It includes accounts of stop-overs in Athens, Basra, various parts of the Indian subcontinent, Malaya, Java, Batavia (Jakarta), Bandoeng (Bandung), Alexandria and Rome. The final destination strikes Dickson as ‘a lovely heavily wooded island with everything extremely clean’ (p. 24). On sightseeing in the Sultanate of Johor, he comments: ‘the visit was admirable and the monkeys around the place were as tame as I, but a hundred times smaller and slimmer and, I guess cooler’ (p. 26). There is also a description of the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, which attracted twelve million visitors (pp. 37–44), and of a 1939 trip to New York, with photographs of the Rockefeller Centre (pp. 55–59). Dickson incorporates a poem entitled ‘The Night Ashore’ (pp. 45–54). In poignant contrast to the glamour of air travel, the journal gives an insight into a world which, on the brink of war, was still feeling the effects of the 1929 crash: while in New York, Dickson ‘went walking in some of the poorer streets, where 15 cents. is a lot of money. Unemployed men and women walked around sadly, hopelessly, it seemed, in droves . . . America has her own troubles. If there is a war, when will she enter it? . . . Chamberlain must declare war this time’ (p. 58). There volume has no title page, seemingly as issued; and author and title are taken from the cover, which is illustrated with an evocative sketch of a sea plane.

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