[Rarebooks] fa: [INDIA & NEAR EAST] Edward Ives: REIZE NAAR OOST-INDIE EN PERSIE w/ Maps+Plates 1779

[ArCh]

Listed now, auctions ending MONDAY, April 22. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/y3tbxvzl

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Edward Ives: Reize naar Oost-Indie en Persie, en de daar omliggende landen. Ondernomen langs een' ongewoonen weg. Amsterdam: de Compagnie, 1779. First edition thus. Two volumes, 4to (27 cm), in early (original?) heavy card covers; [16], 324 pp.; [4], 379, [1] pp.; with half-titles and engraved title-pages in both volumes, 2 large folding engraved maps and 9 engraved plates, two of which are folding (complete). Now housed and protected in chemises and slipcases.

Internally very good, with exceptionally fine examples of the maps and plates. Bindings worn and fragile but holding, loss to the spines, one vol. lacking its lower cover; occasional toning, mostly light, to the text leaves, browning to the latter leaves of vol. II, the same volume also having a small area of worming to the blank gutter margins of ca. 20 leaves (not affecting the text or plates); otherwise generally quite clean, the maps and plates very bright and fresh.

First Dutch edition of Ives's A Voyage from England to India... Also, a Journey From Persia to England by an unusual Route (1773). Edward Ives was surgeon aboard Vice-Admiral Charles Watson's flagship Kent from 1753-57. In 1755 the squadron sailed, via the Cape of Good Hope and Madagascar, to India and spent many months visiting the subcontinent's major ports and English settlements. Returning home overland, Ives traveled through the Middle East, via Basra, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo and Latakia — a journey foreshadowing that of Carsten Niebuhr a few years later — then on to Cyprus and Venice, finally arriving back in England in 1759. The large folding maps depict India and the Indian Ocean, and Ives's route from Basra and Latakea. The plates include views of the notorious pirate refuge Fort Geriah, the Tower of Babel and Zorastrian "towers of silence" (with carrion birds perched on the corpses), and an early western depiction of a hookah.