Arabian Sands. by THESIGER, Wilfred - 1959

London: Longmans,, 1959. Octavo. Original cream boards, letters to spine in gilt and black. With the dust jacket. With frontispiece and 46 plates, 8 maps to the text, some full-page, folding map loosely in and end-pocket. Contemporary ownership inscription to front pastedown. A very good copy, square and bright, with faint foxing to book block and endpapers, in the original price-clipped dust jacket, slightly faded with some nicks and creases to extremities, but otherwise presentable. First edition, first impression. This was Thesiger's first book and "and, in his opinion, his finest" (ODNB). "During the years that I was in Arabia I never thought that I would write a book about my travels … Seven years after leaving Arabia I showed some photographs I had taken to Graham Watson and he strongly urged me to write a book about the desert. This I refused to do … The following day Graham Watson came to see me again, and this time he brought Mark Longman with him. After much argument the two of them persuaded me to try to write this book. Now that I have finished it I am grateful to them, for the effort to remember every detail has brought back vividly into my mind the Bedu amongst whom I travelled, and the vast empty land across which I rode on camels for ten thousand miles" (Introduction).