The `Library Edition` of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (12 Volumes)

Leonard C Smithers and translated by Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, London: H S Nicholas, 1894

In 12 Volumes
Volume1: xxxii, 416 pages
Volume 2: viii, 431 pages
Volume 3: ix, 444 pages
Volume 4: x, 420 pages
Volume 5: viii, 400 pages
Volume 6: 408 pages
Volume 7: 406 pages
Volume 8: xii, 424 pages
Volume 9: xiii, 444 pages
Volume 10: xix, 479 pages
Volume 11: ix, 495 pages
Volume 12: xxiii, 399 pages

Original cloth bindings with pictorial gilt stamping to the upper board and spine in gilt, top edges gilt (each)
10.2 x 6.5 in (25.5 x 16.2 cm) (each)

First Nichols and Smithers edition, also called as The 'Library Edition' of this Masterpiece of World literature 'The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night'. This edition was edited by the friend of the translator Richard Burton, Leonard C Smithers. Published by H S Nichols and Co.

This edition was published soon after Lady Burton's family edition and shortly before the illustrated library edition. This edition is of importance as it reinstates the text originally omitted by Lady Burton's edition. As stated in the preface, Smithers intention in the restoration was so that this work can finally 'take its proper place on the library shelf alongside Cervantes and Shakespeare.' Richard Burton's translation of 'One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights' is his best-known work. The text is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales originally compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age.

Richard Burton was one of the foremost linguists of his time, an explorer, poet, translator, ethnologist, and archaeologist, among other things. He also wrote the authoritative version of the now-famous Kama Sutra.

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