1923 The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night

Description

Colour Plates, Illustrated, Leather Binding, Limited Edition

A limited edition of seven hundred and fifty sets, of which this is numbered two hundred and one. Privately printed for subscribers of the Casanova Society.

Illustrated with a colour frontispiece to each volume. Collated, complete.

'Arabian Nights', or 'One Thousand and One Nights', is a collection of folk tales from the Middle East. It was collected over centuries, with the roots of the tales being traced from Greek, Indian, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Jewish folklore.

The tales are being told by Scheherazade to the King Shahryar, in a bid to save her life. After discovering his wife was cheating on him, he killed her, and vowed to marry a new virgin every day, and then behead them the next. In this vein, he had killed one-thousand and one women before marrying Scheherazade. Scheherazade entices the King by telling him a story on their first night together, pausing halfway through as the sun came up. The King, being absorbed by the story, keeps Scheherazade alive, eager to hear more from her.

This edition was rendered from the version of Dr. J. C. Mardrus, and collated with other sources by E. Powys Mathers. 

Bookplate of Travers Christmas Humphreys to the front paste downs of each volume except for Volume II. Humphreys was a jurist, who prosecuted several controversial cases in the 1940s and 1950s, including the cases of Craig & Bentley, Ruth Ellis, and Timothy Evans, three significant cases which played a part in the later abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom. Additionally, he was an enthusiastic proponent of the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship.