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60 RAMSAY, Sir W. M., & Gertrude L. Bell. The Thousand and One Churches. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909 with the highly elusive dust jacket First edition, first impression, of this important monograph; copies in the dust jacket are extremely scarce. “In December 1906 Bell set out to resume her architectural and archaeological researches in Anatolia. She joined Ramsay in May 1907 and they explored the Hittite and Byzantine site of Bin-bir-kilisse in Turkey. Her particular contribution was in establishing the chronology of Byzantine churches in the region. More practical than the absent-minded Ramsay, she directed the team of Turkish diggers. Returning to Britain in August 1907 she and Ramsay published their results in The Thousand and One Churches (1909), to which she contributed the greater part, writing the chapters on the buildings and ecclesiastical architecture” ( ODNB ). Bell returned to the site, an important Byzantine Christian centre, for a third time in 1909, when she found that a large number of the documented buildings had been removed for cut stone. Consequently, the present work is invaluable in capturing conditions before those dispiriting depredations. As Bell writes in the preface: “The process of ruin . . . is now beginning to be accelerated by man. There is a melancholy difference between the facts of 1907 and the facts of 1909. We have therefore multiplied the number of photographs, many of which show what is now lost”. Octavo. Original green cloth, gilt-lettered spine, untrimmed. With dust jacket. Illustrated throughout with plates and maps. Binding a little rubbed at extremities, inner hinges cracked but firm, unclipped jacket rather soiled, some nicks, chips, and closed tears, numbered “490” on spine panel in blue pencil, yet this remains a perfectly decent ex-Boots library copy, front cover with ghost of their shield label and issue slip removed from rear pastedown. ¶ Howgego I, p. 83. Jane Robinson, Wayward Women , 1990; John Theakstone, An Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Women Travellers , 2017. £2,500 [159440]
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61 REISCH, Max. Im Auto nach Koweit. Eine Arabienreise. Vienna: Ullstein & Co., 1953 kuwait road trip First edition, first impression, an uncommon account of the pioneering Austrian traveller’s journey from Beirut to Kuwait, with photos throughout giving a fascinating insight into a fast- changing nation. It is scarce outside the German-speaking world, with only 24 holdings of both the first and second editions in WorldCat, most of which are in Germany. Max Reisch (1912–1985) was a seasoned long-distance traveller, completing the first overland journey to India from Europe in 1933. He published a number of travel narratives of his trips to Africa, Southeast Asia, and across the Middle East. The present work details his journey with Helmuth Hahmann, the aim being to record the rapid pace of change in the Middle East after the Second World War. They travelled via Damascus and Jerusalem, along the recently completed Trans-Arabian Pipeline, and returned through Basra and Baghdad. Kuwait was rapidly undergoing seismic social and economic transformations following the discovery of oil in 1938 and Reisch’s portrait shows a society on the cusp of monumental change. Photographs document the final decade of the British protectorate; new architecture and the proliferation of cars; traditional buildings and ways of life; new oil installations; and the peoples of Kuwait. Reisch and Hahmann travelled in a German-made Jenbacher Werke Gutbrod Atlas 800, one of Europe’s first campervans, partly designed by Reisch himself. The original model, named ‘Arabia- Sadigi’, still survives and is held as part of the permanent Max Reisch collection at the Top Mountain Motorcycle Museum in Obergurgl, Austria.
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