[Rarebooks] fa: [EGYPT, &c.] WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT - MY DIARIES 1888-1914 Bumpus Morocco Bindings

[ArCh]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, November 17. Images and more details can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/w5lhoul

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: My Diaries. Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888-1914. Part One 1888 to 1900 [and Part Two 1900 to 1914]. London: Martin Secker, 1919-20. First edition. Two volumes, 8vo (22 cm), in three-quarter plum morocco and marbled boards by Bumpus (signed on the front turn-in), top page edges gilt, marbled endpapers; 512, 511 pp.; frontispiece in each volume. Elegant bindings with sunning to the spines, contents lightly toned but clean and sound. With the elaborate engraved bookplates of society hostess, philanthropist, suffragist and "godmother of nursing" Annie Cowdray, Viscountess Cowdray (1860-1932). The bookplates, signed "WPB 1922," depict Dunecht House, the Viscountess's stately home in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922), was an English poet, traveler, anti-imperialist, and horse breeder. Blunt and his wife Anne, a granddaughter of Lord Byron, traveled extensively throughout the Levant and North Africa, and established a stud farm, Sheykh Obeyd, near Cairo, where they raised Arabian horses. The diaries contain much on Blunt's time in Egypt, but also cover his travels in Europe and his observations on many of the political and cultural figures and events of the time (the Fashoda Incident, William Morris and the Kelmscott Press, the death of Oscar Wilde, etc. etc.).