First English edition, with handsome illustrations, describing the 1906 expedition to the Rwenzori mountain range in present-day Uganda under the stewardship of Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, the Duke of Abruzzi.

One of the great Italian noblemen explorers of his day, Prince Luigi Amedeo led expeditions to Eritrea, Canada, and famously the North Pole before leading a team to the Rwenzori mountains – the so-called ‘mountains of the moon’ – after reading a summary of a lecture by Henry Morton Stanley in 1905. Meticulously planned and gargantuan in size, the expedition caravan, comprising over 400 geologists, botanists, zoologists, and photographers and 200 Ugandan porters, set off from Lake Victoria in May 1906, heading towards the mountains on Uganda’s western border. ‘For the next six months, most of which were spent in perpetual rain, the team spread out in all directions, producing the first detailed maps of the area and making several ascents. Most of the major peaks and features were named, including Mount Margherita (= Mt Stanley, 5109 metres, ascended on 18.6.06) and Mount Alexandra (5044 metres), while one of the smaller peaks in the range, Luigi de Savoia (4627 metres) was christened by Abruzzi after himself. The duke brought back a vast collection of maps, photographs and scientific observations’ (Howgego III, A2).

Accompanying the expedition was Filippo de Filippi, a trained medic and keen mountaineer who had already been part of the duke’s mountaineering expedition to Alaska and would later accompany his unsuccessful assault on K2. Upon his return to Italy, Filippi published this, the official record of the expedition and its various scientific accomplishments and mountaineering exploits. Originally published in Italian (also 1908), the work was translated into English by Filippo’s wife Caroline, an American poet (née Fitzgerald). The work is particularly notable for the more than 150 photographs by the Italian photographer Vittoro Sella, a member of the expedition: among these are several stunning large-scale folding panorama’s depicting the snow-capped Rwenzori mountain range from the summits of some of its highest peaks.

Howgego IV, F11; Neate 265.

You may also be interested in...

CONTEMPORARY MOROCCO WITH ONLAYS [PSALMS.] 

The whole Booke of Psalmes, collected into English Meter by Tho. Strenhold, Jo. Hopkins, W. Whittingham, and others … with apt Notes to sing then withal … 

A very attractive pocket psalm-book with tunes, ruled in red throughout and in a handsome binding.  Such diminutive psalm books began to appear at the end of the sixteenth-century, printed for the Company of Stationers, who had the monopoly.  The printer here was Thomas Cotes, most famous as printer of the Second Folio of Shakespeare in 1632, who became a Master of the Company in this year. 

Read more

REVISED AND ENLARGED FREEMAN, Arthur.

Bibliotheca Fictiva: A Collection of Books & Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery 400 BC – AD 2000.

This fully revised and enlarged edition of Bibliotheca Fictiva – the descriptive inventory of a collection of books and manuscripts relating to literary forgery in the Western world over the last twenty-four centuries, now housed in the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University – adds more than six hundred new entries that introduce some sixty entirely new impostors or subjects of imposture. Individual descriptions have been substantially corrected and updated, and the original ‘Overview’ correspondingly amplified.

Read more