Les Textes Thamoudéens de Philby, Volume I, Inscriptions du Sud, Volume II, Inscriptions du Nord, Bibliothèque du Muséon, Volume 39 and 41

Louvain: Université de Louvain, Institut Orientaliste, 1956. Softcover. Near Fine. Volume I: xvi, 192 pp + illustrations. Volume II: xxxiv, 163 pp + xxiii (illustrations). Orignal printed wrappers. Both volumes have unopened pages, light shelf wear; else clean and sound. Text is in French. DNB: "In 1926 [Philby] settled in Jiddah [Saudi Arabia] founded a trading company, Sharqieh Ltd, and became a close friend and an unofficial adviser of Ibn Sa'ud. Business, exploration, writing, and Ibn Sa'ud's councils were henceforth the pattern of his life. Commerce, however, was only his bread and butter: his true interest was exploration. Over the next thirty years he made a series of remarkable journeys, of which the greatest was his crossing of the 'empty quarter' in 1932. On these journeys he travelled by camel and later by car. By day he collected place names, temperatures, compass bearings, barometric pressures, rocks, fossils, flora and fauna, and ancient inscriptions. At night he wrote them up in his diaries, squatting in the sand by lamplight and hiding his work from his suspicious Arab escort. These journeys and the many books, articles, and lectures in which he described them are a monument to his scholarship, industry, and endurance, and won him high honour with the Royal Geographical Society, the British Museum, Kew Gardens, and academic societies all over the world."