F. Kingdon-Ward. The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges, 1926.

F. Kingdon-Ward. THE RIDDLE OF THE TSANGPO GORGES. Edward Arnold, London, 1926.

Current Selling Prices
$1200-$3000 /£600-£1500

NATURAL HISTORY / TRAVEL & EXPLORATION
One of those books you occasionally glimpse at book fairs but rarely anywhere else. Early in 1924 Frank Kingdon-Ward went on an expedition to try to discover the falls on the Tsangpo river which were enshrined in Tibetan folklore. With the world's attention on China and its brutal treatment of its own Tibetan people one wonders how parties of explorers would now be received there. Kingdon Ward had heard the legend of a waterfall, over a hundred feet high, in a land which was a virtual shangri-la. Tibetans apparently believed that this was a kind of magical promised land. No westerner had ever seen it. An attempt had been made by a contemporary explorer who made the journey from the Brahmaputra through treacherous country, escaping death narrowly, and then from Tibet he started from Pemako and worked his way along the gorge but was unable to penetrate far enough to see the falls. When Kingdon-Ward began his attempt he was accompanied by Lord Cawdor who found K-W a trying companion and the pace slow "...It drives me clean daft to walk behind him... if ever I travel again, I'll make damned sure it's not with a botanist. They are always stopping to gape at weeds." Cawdor also complained about the food, despite this being the best stocked of Frank's sorties. (They had bought provisions at Fortnum and Mason) Frank was, seemingly, unaware of any problem and barely had a bad word to say about Cawdor.

K-W and Cawdor went further along the gorge than any other explorer and discovered several falls. One they named Rainbow falls which was about forty feet high,however they did not find the magical area that had given birth to the legend. 74 years later a new expedition with Ken Storm, Kenneth Cox, Ian Baker and Hamid Sadar finally discovered the falls (just about a quarter of a mile from where Frank and Cawdor turned back). They combine with the Rainbow falls to complete a compound drop of well over 120 feet. The area around is bathed in constant spray and as a result is a micro rain forest habitat. Certainly a Shangri-la, but not enough room, sadly, for the whole Tibetan race. This lead to a handsome reprint of his book "The Riddle of the Tsangpo Gorges" published by Antique Collectors Club. (I am indebeted to the Tooley Watkins blog at Geocities for much of this info.)

Kingdon Ward was primarily a plant hunter and botanist and most of his books are on these subjects. The star find of this expedition was the Meconopsis Betonicifolia. It caused a stir when shown back in England. It is also known as the Himalayan Blue Poppy or the Tibetan Poppy (see above) and is referred to in the title of one of Kingdon Ward's rarest and most prized books 'The Land of the Blue Poppy' (Cambridge, 1913.) A copy inscribed by him but not in great condition made £1700 at last year at Bloomsbury.

VALUE? 'Blue Poppy' is probably the most valuable of his books followed by 'The Mystery Rivers of Tibet' (London 1923) which made £1500 (in frayed d/w) in the same sale and then 'Tsangpo Gorges' which has made about £1300 in auction. The Antique Club reprint has not helped the book's fortunes--it is a handsome production and can be had for about £120 to £200 -with one lunatic asking £500, possibly confusing it with the Edward Arnold first. There are several copies of the first on the web right now in various states of repair with a nice copy at £2200 and another almost as nice at £920. A used but acceptable copy signed by fellower explorer George Forrest that sold at Bloomsbury last year still sits on the web at £1950 - a less than 50% mark up forom the sale price. Condition has always been vital in cloth travel books, almost more important than in literature and modern firsts, and only very sharp copies can get over £1000 with auction results being an unreliable guide to what can actually be achieved in real life--another riddle.

The Road to Oxiana...

After Akcha, the colour of the landscape changed from lead to aluminium, pallid and deathly, as if the sun had been sucking away its gaiety for thousands and thousands of years; for this was now the plain of Balkh, and Balkh they say is the oldest city in the world. The clumps of green trees, the fountain-shaped tufts of coarse cutting grass, stood out almost black against this mortal tint. Sometimes we saw a field of barley; it was ripe, and Turcomans, naked to the waist, were reaping it with sickles. But it was not brown or gold, telling of Ceres, of plenty. It seemed to have turned prematurely white, like the hair of a madman – to have lost its nourishment. And from these acred cerements, first on the north and then on the south of the road, rose the worn grey-white shapes of a bygone architecture, mounds, furrowed and bleached by the rain and sun, wearier than any human works I ever saw....




Robert Byron. THE ROAD TO OXIANA. Macmillan, London 1937.

Current Selling Prices
$1500-$4000 /£750-£2000

MODERN FIRST EDITION / TRAVEL WRITING
The greatest travel writer of his day, aesthete and leading member of the Brideshead generation and connoisseur of coloured architecture. The Road to Oxiana, describes his journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34. 20 years ago the book was known to a mere few of the cognoscenti (the cognac scented as one wag has it.) After it appeared in a catalogue for £500 and sold, one over zealous dealer travelled the length of Britain looking for it (they had quite a few shops back then) and asked every seller if he had a copy. It is not an especially rare rare book so he found a few. The book was then wide awake and later started to achieve spectacular results in auction and is no longer fun unless you find it at the bottom of a tea chest in a sale that somehow has eluded being listed on the web. Trouble is they are all listed and they don't use tea chests anymore...

Robert Byron is referred to (by Philip Hensher) as a 'High priest of Camp' mainly from the set he ran with at Oxford (Hypocrites Club etc.,) His taste, sometimes called kitsch, was for things that others at the time disdained - like Byzantine art and Persian architecture, Georgian buildings, Victoriana etc., He was said to resemble Queen Victoria and occasionally dressed up as her for parties. He never gave up his youthful enthusiasms or his desire to shock; he lost friends over his insistence from the start that Hitler would have to be fought, and that the Munich agreement was a disgrace. He did not get on with Evelyn Waugh. He was surprisingly rugged, his journey into Tibet in 1929, for instance, was by any standards extremely harrowing and physically taxing. This is covered in a useful work 'First Russia, Then Tibet' (Macmillan 1933)--not uncommon but can command a £100 note and a lot more in the jacket. His signature is highly uncommon, earlier this year we bought a couple of presentation copies --including one of his first book 'Europe in the Looking-Glass. Reflections of a Motor Drive from Grimsby to Athens' (1926). We described it thus:

'Signed presentation from the author --'Mrs.Harrod - if only I had seen her more- Robert Byron.' This is Lady Wilhelmine 'Billa' Harrod who was married to the economist Roy Harrod and co - authored the Shell Guide to Norfolk with John Betjeman, to whom she had been briefly engaged. In 1937 as Billa Cresswell she had been the secretary and only employee of the Georgian Group with which Byron was passionately involved; he said of her '...she would make a wonderful agitator.' On her marriage to Roy Harrod in 1938 she gave up the job and this inscription obviously refers to that. Billa Harrod continued to agitate for the saving of beautiful buildings all her long life, Robert Byron was killed in the war in 1941.'

It was not a nice copy but went to a collector fairly smartly at £800.

VALUE? A copy of 'Oxiana' in a decent jacket made £1400 + premium in 2004. A fairly decent copy is on sale as we speak at £2000. The book will probably go up gently as modern travel writing becomes more collected. The great proponent of Byron was Bruce Chatwin who has turned him into something of a cult. Meanwhile Chatwin's own 'Oxiana', his first book 'In Patagonia' has declined in value--at one point it was knocking on a grand but can now be found for less than £500 'fine/fine' -- there are too many about and it is possible that he is less admired than he was in the 1990s. There are several other Robert Byron rarities and 'sleepers' that I might address at some point...

Richard Burton. Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah. 1855

"His dress and appearance were those suggesting a released convict...He wore, habitually, a rusty black coat with a crumpled black silk stock, his throat destitute of collar, a costume which his muscular frame and immense chest made singularly and incongruously hideous, above it a countenance the most sinister I have ever seen, dark, cruel, treacherous with eyes like a wild beast's. He reminded me by turns of a black leopard, caged but unforgiving  ... . In his talk he affected an extreme brutality, and if one could believe the whole of what he said, he had indulged in every vice and committed every crime. I soon found, however, that most of these recitals were indulged in pour epater le bourgeiose and that his inhumanity was more pretended than real. Even the ferocity of his countenance gave place at times to more agreeable expressions, and I can just understand the infatuated fancy of his wife that in spite of his ugliness he was the most beautiful man alive. "  -- Wilfrid Blunt, Diaries.

"The man riveted my attention. He was dark and forceful, and masterful, and ruthless. I have never seen so iron a countenance."
Bram Stoker 1879.


Richard Burton. PERSONAL NARRATIVE OF A PILGRIMAGE TO EL-MEDINAH AND MECCAH. 3 Vols. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London 1855–1856.

Current Selling Prices
$6500-$20000 /£3200-£10000

CLASSIC TRAVEL
I was thinking of this book recently while listening to an audio CD of John Dunning's 'The Bookman's Promise' travelling to an auction. The plot centers around a lost / stolen collection of Burton first editions in particular a signed presentation copy of an 1855 'Medinah'. The 3 volume work is described (improbably) as 'factory fresh' and our hero Janeway, cop turned bookdealer, pays $30,000 for it in 1997 - at the time this was equivalent to £20K. It seemed a bit strong but this was fiction. Auction records reveal this as the highest ever record:

Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821-90 - [Alternate Names: Baker, Frank] - Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah.  L, 1855-56 - 1st Ed - 3 vols. 8vo, - contemp half calf - joints & edges rubbed - With 14 litho plates, all but 1 colored or tinted, folding map & 3 plans. - Lacking ad leaves at end of Vol I; some spotting - Inscr to Stick in the Mud & sgd with his Arabic signature - Christie's South Kensington, May 8, 2003, lot 261, £11,000 ($17,930) - BMNH

This is about £13k with commissions. A very decent unsigned copy with 'minor wear' - the Peter Hopkirk copy - achieved £12000 in 1998. Given these records, it is not unimaginable that a signed copy in supernatural condition could make £20K +.



Burton is seriously collected and appears to be rising in value. He was was an explorer, linguist, and cultural anthropologist of the highest calibre--also a soldier, diplomat, mystic,sexologist, orientalist, sportsman, drinker, superb fencer and a spy - handsome, manly, possibly bi-sexual, possibly a killer and 'the most beautiful man alive.' In his time he seems to have been regarded rather like Crowley in the 1920s - a scandalous, outrageous and dangerous figure. 'Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah' is one of the great travel classics along with Doughty's 'Arabia Deserta.' He was fluent in Arabic (and in more than 20 other languages!) and disguised himself as a Moslem in order to penetrate, at the risk of his life, the holiest of Islamic shrines, forbidden to non-Moslems. He acquired the art of disguise when roaming among the villages of Southern Scinde. Less than half a dozen Europeans were known to have made the hajj, or pilgrimage, to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina and lived, and of those only the Swiss explorer J. L. Burckhardt had left a detailed account. During the several days that Burton spent in Mecca, he performed the associated rites of the pilgrimage such as circumambulating the Kaaba, drinking the Zemzem water and stoning the devil at Mount Arafat. His resulting book surpassed all preceding Western accounts of the holy cities, even Burckhardt who, as it notes in the preface of this work

:...was prostrated by sickness throughout the period of his stay in the Northern Hejaz, he was not able to describe it as satisfactorily or minutely as he did the Southern country, — he could not send a plan of the Mosque, or correct the popular but erroneous ideas which prevail concerning it and the surrounding city."

Because Burton respected and admired Muslim customs and beliefs, the Muslims downplayed the intrusion with the comment that Burton was in reality an Arab.

VALUE? 'Medinah' appeared in grained ink blue cloth with 15 full page illustrations, 6 of which are in colour, plus 2 fold out maps and 1 fold out diagrams. A second edition, slightly revised, came out in 1857 and is worth about a tenth of the first's value. As recorded above a fab copy can be cashed in for ten grand English, rebound copies about a third to a half of this.

TRIVIA. He was accused of having murdered a man on this trip to Mecca. The story was that on the journey he had accidentally revealed himself as a European and killed the man (in some versions a boy) to keep his secret. While Burton often denied this, he was also given to winding up the gullible - a doctor once asked him, "How do you feel when you have killed a man?" Burton retorted, "Quite jolly, what about you?" When asked by a priest about the same incident Burton is said to have replied "Sir, I'm proud to say I have committed every sin in the Decalogue."

On reaching the Holy City he performed all the rituals of the Hajj and was so affected by it that on returning to London he formed a company to enable pilgrims to reach Mecca more easily: "The Hadjilik, or Pilgrimage to Mecca, Syndicate, Limited." In Burton's tremendous enthusiasm for this pilgrimage he may have minimized its dangers. An early example of a themed holiday-- how real this syndicate was, whether it was a full fledged travel bureau etc., remains a mystery.

His 'Kasidah' of 1870 - a "Lay of the Higher Law" was said to be by one Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî but this was simply a pseudonym which Burton used as the author of this poem; he originally credited himself only as the "translator". My favourite lines, oddly topical, are:

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown
In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.