BULAQ PRESS: ALF LAYLA WA-LAYLA.

£250,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Kitab Alf layla wa-layla (One Thousand and One Nights). First complete edition in Arabic of the Thousand and One Nights, the first edition printed in the Arab world; from the collection of the French oriental scholar Charles Barbier de Meynard; exceedingly rare in commerce and with fewer than a dozen complete copies located in libraries worldwide.The Bulaq edition was prepared by one 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sifti al-Sharqawi, probably from a single manuscript that is now lost. Its only competitors for priority were the so-called Calcutta I and Breslau editions. Calcutta I denotes the selection of 200 "Nights" only printed at Calcutta between 1814 and 1818. Breslau was the place of printing of the multi-volume edition by the German orientalist Max Habicht begun in 1824, though it remained incomplete on his death in 1839 and depended on the Bulaq text as one of its sources. The Bulaq edition proved "more correct than the garbled and semi-colloquial renderings given by the manuscripts used in the compilations of Calcutta I and Breslau", and helped to stabilize the Thousand and One Nights corpus (Irwin, p. 44).It was the primary source for Edward Lane's pioneering English translation (1838-41) and for the last of the four historically important Arabic editions, published at Calcutta in 1839-42 (and known as "Calcutta II"). Bulaq and Calcutta II "superseded almost completely all other texts and formed the general notion of the Arabian Nights. For more than half a century it was neither

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