Arabian Sands

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd, 1959. First edition, first impression. Octavo. Original beige cloth, spine lettered in black and gilt. With pictorial dust jacket. Frontispiece and 46 plates, 8 maps to the text, some full-page, with folding map intact in a pocket at the back.

This was Thesiger's first book and "in his opinion, his finest" (ODNB). In the introduction, he writes: "During the years that I was in Arabia I never thought that I would write a book about my travels... Seven years after leaving Arabia I showed some photographs I had taken to Graham Watson and he strongly urged me to write a book about the desert. This I refused to do... The following day Graham Watson came to see me again, and this time he brought Mark Longman with him. After much argument the two of them persuaded me to try to write this book. Now that I have finished it I am grateful to them, for the effort to remember every detail has brought back vividly into my mind the Bedu amongst whom I travelled, and the vast empty land across which I rode on camels for ten thousand miles".

Ex-library example. Heavy crushing to corners and spine tips, small punctured mark to front cover, a few small marks to covers. The edges are tanned and foxed, with additional foxing to prelims, and the text block is cocked. Tape residue to front and rear paste-downs and endpapers, slight dent into lower-right corner of the page block, light crack with netting exposed between pages 240 and 241. Else a clean and uninscribed copy. In a good, unclipped dust wrapper, priced 35/- NET to front flap, with slight sunning to spine and tape marks to front and rear flaps, a little wear and additional tanning to extremities, and slight nibbling to spine tips. The dust wrapper has now been placed in a removable, protective sleeve of archival quality. The map at the rear is intact.