A Fine Set in Dustwrappers of Hedin’s Account of His Crossing of the Northern Persian Desert
HEDIN, Sven Anders.
Öfver Land till Indien. Genom Persien, Seistan och Belutjistan. Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1910.
2 volumes, 8vo (224 x 154mm), pp. I: [2 (blank l.)], [10 (half-title, impression number on verso, title, imprint on verso, dedication, verso blank, foreword)], 564; II: [4 (half-title, impression number on verso, title, imprint on verso)], 553, [1 (blank)], [2 (contents, verso blank)]; colour-printed frontispieces, retaining tissue guards, 4 colour-printed plates, one folding colour-printed lithographic panorama, 82 plates, 4 double-page, 2 folding colour-printed lithographic maps, half-tone illustrations in the text, some full-page; l. I, 1/1 slightly creased and chipped on margin; original yellow cloth, upper boards blocked in black and ochre with design, spines decorated and lettered in ochre, original printed dustwrappers; dustwrapper spines a little faded, one damp-marked, edges slightly chipped and with short tears, nonetheless a very fresh, bright set with the original dustwrappers; provenance: C.F. Lundquist (early 20th-century engraved bookplates on upper pastedowns).
First edition, first to fourth thousand copies. Hedin’s account of his 1905-1906 journey across the northern Persian deserts from Teheran to India; as he explains in the preface, ‘Den egentliga resan börjar först från Teheran, och utanför Teherans portar börjar också öknen. Sedan är det intet annat än öken hela vägen till Indiens gräns’ (‘The journey proper began from Tehran, and at the gates of Tehran the desert also begins. Thereafter, there is nothing but desert all the way to the borders of India’). The main purpose of Hedin’s journey was to study the geology and topography of the areas traversed, and during its course he carefully explored and mapped the great basins of the eastern areas of Persia, with their salt lakes and deserts (the Kavir). Shortly after the work was first published in this edition, an English translation appeared under the title Overland to India (London: 1910), and a German edition was titled Zu Land nach Indien (Leipzig: 1910).
Wilson, Bibliography of Persia, p. 93.