Langsdorff, Georg Heinrich von

3 volumes (2 volumes text, second German edition, and 2 volumes atlas bound in one, first German edition), 8vo (166 x 100mm.) and 4to (252 x 200mm.), atlas with 45 engraved plates and leaf of music (comprising, vol.1: portrait, 27 plates and leaf of music printed recto and verso; vol.2: portrait and 16 plates), bindings not uniform, text contemporary half calf over tree calf boards, spines gilt with orange label, atlas contemporary red half morocco, text volumes somewhat spotted and with library stamps on titles, one text leaf in atlas with tear repaired without loss, one plate and adjacent text leaf slightly spotted

“Biblioteka generalnago shtaba”, Library of the General Staff Academy, St Petersburg, nineteenth-century armorial bookplate

cf. Hill (2004) 968; Howes L81; Lada-Mocarski 69; Sabin 38895 (for first editions); for text vols. see Du Rietz 707

the condition of this lot is as described in the catalogue description
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"Langsdorff was a German physician, with a passion for natural history. Together with Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, chamberlain of Czar Alexander I and Russian ambassador to Japan, Langsdorff accompanied the round-the-world expedition led by Kruzenshtern until it reached Kamchatka in 1805. The first volume of this work contains an account of that famous Russian expedition in the Nadezhda and the Neva. At Kamchatka, Rezanov and Langsdorff left the expedition and proceeded to the Aleutian Islands and to Alaska, to study the Russian-American Company for the Czar. The following year Rezanov, with Langsdorff and Davydov, sailed from Sitka to San Francisco to obtain food supplies for the Russian colony. Langsdorff relates his travels along the northwest coast and his journey back across Siberia to St. Petersburg. Nearly seventy pages are devoted to the extensive visit by Rezanov to San Francisco and the surrounding country in 1806... The German edition is very desirable since it contains the first view of San Francisco... His description of the Marquesans is particularly important and has become something of a classic" (Hill).