Search Results: Authors starting with H from PY Rare Books

The first circumnavigation by a blind person: first edition, illustrated with more than 20 plates, and very rare in the original cloth. We could not trace any other copy similarly bound selling at auction in the past 40 years; Brooke-Hitching's copy was in a later Riviere binding.Born in Exeter, James Holman (1786 – 1857) served in the British Royal Navy, and in 1811 at the age of 25 lost his eyesight due to an illness (possibly through scurvy contracted while serving off the coast of the Americas). As he writes in his introduction, sedentary life made him physically and morally sick: only while travelling he felt alive, free and dignified. Following this philosophy, the "Blind Traveller" set out on a journey around the world in the early 1830s, and became in 1832 the first blind person to circumnavigate the globe.This 4-volume edition describes in detail his remarkable achievement, spanning Brazil, Singapore, China, Australia, India and Africa, and including chapters on Madagascar, the Comoro… Read More

An attracticve example, in original wrappers, of this rare and early study of Turki dialects, produced in China with mimeograph printing.
The Scottish missionary and scholar George William Hunter (1873-1949) gained prominence through his service with an evangelical Protestant organisation "China Inland Mission" in Turkestan (modern-day areas in Central Asia and Northwest China). He reached China in 1889 and served in the mission for almost sixty years; he died in the north-central province of Gansu in 1946, having returned home only once, for a year in 1900. One of the very few Westerners with such an intimate understanding of the region at that time, he translated religious texts into the dialects spoken by isolated local tribes and preached in Kazakh, Uyghur, Manchu, Mongolian, Nogai, Arabic, and Chinese.
Hunter created his Examples of The Various Turki Dialects in a small number of copies by using an old mimeograph machine that would force ink through a stencil onto paper, with each sheet rolled… Read More