antiquarian bookseller - Peter Harrington

Peter Harrington Antiquarian Bookseller
INSCRIBED TO HIS “RECORDING
ANGEL”.
206.STEIN, Sir (Marc) Aurel.
Ruins of Desert Cathay. Personal
Narrative of Explorations in Central
Asia and Westernmost China.
London, Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1912 [39603] £1750
2 volumes, 8vo. Original sienna cloth, title gilt to spines,
embossed gilt roundel to the upper boards, top edge gilt. others
uncut. Numerous plates, maps and plans including 8 coloured
plates and 6 folding uncoloured panoramas, 3 folding coloured
lithographic maps. Two contemporary photographs of Chinese
religious banners loosely inserted. Some foxing and browning
throughout, hinges loose and consequently somewhat shaken,
front free endpaper, half-title, and frontispiece loose in vol. II,
cloth rubbed, a good+ set.
FIRST EDITION. This set inscribed on a slip mounted on the
front pastedown of vol. I, “Presented for Miss F. Lorimer
with kind regards and in grateful remembrance by M. A.
Stein.” Florence Lorimer was Stein’s “R.A.” or “Recording
Angel”, who began her association with Stein at about this
time, working on the unpacking, arranging, photographing
and listing of the artefacts that he was sending back
from this, his second, expedition. She is credited in
the preface here as Miss F. Lorimer and in subsequent
publications under the androgynous name of F. M. G.
Lorimer, as she has signed the second volume of this set.
“Stein’s great achievement … was to establish the
existence of a hitherto lost civilization along the Silk Route
in Chinese central Asia … [he] was the first archaeologist
to discover evidence of the spread of the Graeco-Buddhist
culture of north-west India across Chinese Turkestan and
into China itself … His search for sites and ancient routes
took him deep into the Taklamakan and Lop deserts, from
Keriya in the south to Turfan in the north, from Kashgar in
the west to Tunhuang in the east, across many thousands
of miles … Stein’s best-known find came at Tunhuang
in 1907, during his second expedition (financed by the
government of India and the British Museum), when he
reached the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Discovering
thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and textiles walled
up in a room in one of the caves, he bribed the custodian
to part with many of them. Experts later found them to
date from the fifth to tenth centuries AD. They included
votive banners, Buddhist texts, and early secular works in
a wide variety of scripts and languages, and a large, blockprinted
roll, dating from AD 868, which proved to be the
world’s oldest known printed book, a copy of the popular
Buddhist work The Diamond Sutra” (ODNB).
207.STEIN, Sir (Marc) Aurel.
Innermost Asia. Detailed Report of
Exploration in Central Asia, Kan-Su
and Eastern Ìràn. Carried out and
Described under the Orders of H.M.
Indian Government.
Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1928 [39585] £10,000
4 volumes 4to., 2 volumes, text, volume of plates and plans,
and map-case. Original terracotta buckram, gilt. Over 500
photographic illustrations on half-tone plates to the text
volumes, 138 plates, some coloured, some double-page, and
59 plans to the relevant volume, map-case with 52 folding
maps heliozincographed at the Survey of India, Dehra Dun,
duplicate set of the maps A-D – “Chinese Turkestan and
Kansu” – in envelope of issue loosely inserted into Volume I.
Some very light marginal foxing, front hinge of Volume II a
little cracked, else very good, minor fraying on the edges of
the map-case, an exceptional set.
FIRST EDITION. A comprehensive and scientific report
of Stein’s third exploration of 1913–1916 which took
him to Kashgar, Khotan, across the Pei-shan, the Turfan
depression and the Pamirs to Samarkand before turning
south through eastern Persia to Baluchistan. Superbly
printed and presented, the highly detailed maps being
produced by the Survey of India.
Yakushi S720.
208.STEIN, Sir (Marc) Aurel.
On Alexander’s Track to the Indus.
Personal Narrative of Explorations
on the North-West Frontier of India.
Carried out under the Orders of
H.M. Indian Government by …
London, Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1929 [39601] £750
Large 8vo. Original smooth brown cloth, title gilt to the spine,
embossed gilt roundel to the upper board, top edge gilt. others
uncut. Frontispiece and 61 other plates, 2 folding panoramas,
2 folding coloured maps at the rear. Free endpapers browned,
some scattered foxing, but overall very good, cloth a little
rubbed.
FIRST EDITION. “Alexander the Great held an abiding
fascination for Stein. He made several tours, including
Catalogue 57: Travel Section 4: Asia including Russia
one in 1926 through Swat to try to identify the precise
location of various events during Alexander’s eastern
campaign” (ODNB).
102 103
Yakushi S336.