Travels in Central Asia

London: John Murray, 1864. Hardcover. Very good. xvii, 443 p. 23 cm. 12 b&w plates + fold-out partly coloured map on linen at rear. Half leather with marbled paper boards and marbled text block edges. Worn corners and edges. Ink numerical notation on front pastedown. Some foxing to endpapers and thumbing to first pages.

Title continues: "Being the Account of a Journey From Teheran across the Turkoman Desert on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian to Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarcand, Performed in the Year 1863." Ármin Vámbéry, also known as Arminius Vámbéry (1832 – 1913) was a Hungarian traveller who became an expert on Turkey. A gifted polyglot, by the age of 16, he had a good knowledge of Hungarian, Latin, French, and German, and was learning English, the Scandinavian languages, Russian, Serbian, and other Slavic languages. He was especially attracted by the literature and culture of the Ottoman Empire and, by the age of 20, he had learned enough Ottoman Turkish to enable him to go to Istanbul and establish himself as a private tutor of European languages. Disguised as a Sunni dervish, he then travelled about the Ottoman lands, the first successful journey of its kind undertaken by a European. Thanks to his travels publicized in this book, Vámbéry became an internationally renowned writer and celebrity, acquiring a professorship in the Royal University of Pest. He was acquainted with Bram Stoker, who, in his novel Dracula, has Van Helsing refer to his "friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University."