L. de Laborde | Voyage de l'Arabie Pétrée, Paris, 1830, first edition, unbound sheets in box

Léon Emmanuel Simon Joseph de Laborde

Voyage de l'Arabie Pétrée. Paris: Giard, 1830

FIRST EDITION, folio (601 x 435mm.), title with large lithographed vignette, 68 plates, maps, and plans (of 69, lacking no.61, Arabes du désert), 5 engraved and 63 lithographed, one hand-coloured, 4 double-page or folding, some with 2 views on each plate, the views on india paper, mounted, wood-engravings in-text, with an additional leaf inserted entitled "Explication des planches.... provisoire" relating to the second part, half-title, publisher's wrappers for eight individual parts, in half-cloth portfolio, labels on spine and upper cover, occasional spotting mostly affecting margins, publisher's wrappers frayed and mostly split along fold

Loosely inserted is a pamphlet entitled Rapport sur le voyage dans l'Arabie Pétrée de MM. Léon de Laborde et Linant, par M. Reinaud, membre de l'institut, in original wrappers, 8vo (257 x 135mm.), Paris, Imprimerie Royale, 1835

Travelling from Cairo in 1828 by way of Suez, Tor, Mount Sinai, the convent of Saint Catherine and Aqaba, Laborde made the journey to Petra with the engineer Linant de Bellefonds, executing many drawings of the area and providing the earliest pictorial record of the ruins.

LITERATURE:

Not in Atabey (but cf. 643 for the 8vo English edition); Blackmer 929; Nissen ZBI 2335

PROVENANCE:

Sotheby's, 23 October 1997, lot 455