A Geographical Historie of Africa,

£30,000 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

A lovely copy of one of the most significant early books on Africa. The first Italian edition (Venice, 1550) was the first European publication to provide detailed descriptions of the North African coast and parts of West-central Africa, including the then famously elusive city of Timbuktu. It is also an essential text on Islam in Africa, and one importantly written from an Islamic perspective (the author was born and undertook his travels as a Muslim). This copy has a distinguished provenance, having formerly belonged to Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), who was born in Addis Ababa, and whose decade-long exploration of the Empty Quarter (Rub’ al Khali) is recounted in his 1959 classic, Arabian Sands. Leo Africanus (c.1485-c.1554), whose Arabic name was al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, was born in Granada and educated at Fez. He travelled extensively in northern Africa before being captured by Christian pirates on his return from an ascent of the Nile to Aswan. The pirates, impressed with his intelligence, presented him as a gift to Pope Leo X who persuaded him to convert and stood sponsor at his baptism in 1520 when he took the name Giovanni Leone. He subsequently returned to Africa and died at Tunis. After leaving Cambridge the translator John Pory (1570?-1635) became an assistant to the travel writer Richard Hakluyt who encouraged Pory to produce this work. Dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, it contains 60 pages of additional material consisting of a general description of

• Year: 1600

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