Islamic

Contact Alex Day

The written legacy of the Islamic world from the eighth to the twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on Arabic and Persian manuscripts, together with Western books and manuscripts dealing with Islamic cultures and countries.

Quaritch has been handling such material since the nineteenth century, and has been instrumental in the expansion and refinement of many major collections. Among the important works to pass through our hands have been a manuscript of Nizami's Khamsah, copied for the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1595, now MS Add. 12208 at the British Library; a set of four volumes from a thirty volume Qur'an, one of the earliest known examples of Eastern Kufic, now MS 1417 at the Chester Beatty Library; and Pagano's monumental view of Cairo, printed at Venice in 1549, one of two surviving copies, now in a private collection.
  1. ATABEY, Sefik E. – Leonora NAVARI.

    The Ottoman World. The Sefik E. Atabey Collection. Books, Manuscripts and Maps.

    London: Bernard J. Shapero, 1998.

    First and only edition, limited to 750 sets. A comprehensive catalogue of Sefik E. Atabey's remarkable library of some 1,370 pre-1854 books, manuscripts, and maps relating to the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. Each item is carefully described and annotated, and the catalogue is supplemented...

    £600

  2. BURCKHARDT, Johann Ludwig (John Lewis). 

    Travels in Arabia, comprehending an account of those territories in Hedjaz which the...

    London, Henry Colburn, 1829. 

    First edition, in one volume, recounting Johann Ludwig Burckhardt’s journey to Mecca on behalf of the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa in 1814. 

    £3750

  3. POSTEL, Guillaume.

    De orbis terrae concordia libri quatuor, multiiuga eruditione ac pietate referti, quibus nihil hoc tam perturbato...

    [Basel, Johannes Oporinus, 1544.]

    First edition of all four books of Postel’s vision of the unity of the world. The first book had been printed privately in Paris the previous year while approval of the Sorbonne theologians was awaited. When that was not granted, Postel had the work printed by his friend Oporinus in Basel.

    £4500

  4. SA‘DI, Abu ‘Abd Allah Musharrif al-Din (Adam OLEARIUS, translator).

    Persianischer Rosenthal. In welchen viel lustige...

    Schleswig, Johann Holwein for Johann Nauman in Hamburg, 1654.

    Rare first edition of Olearius’s translation of Sa‘di’s Gulistān or ‘Rose-garden’, richly and engagingly illustrated.

    £6500

  5. VANE, Charles William, Marquess of Londonderry.

    A Steam Voyage to Constantinople, by the Rhine and the Danube, in 1840–41,...

    London, Henry Colburn, 1842. 

    First edition, scarce on the market, of this ‘very interesting work’ (Blackmer) by Vane (1778–1854), the half-brother of Lord Castlereagh who served under Wellington in the Peninsular War and later as ambassador at the Congress of Vienna. 

    £1500