CHURCHILL, Colonel Charles Henry. Mount Lebanon. A Ten Year’s Residence from 1842 to 1852 describing the Manners, Customs, and Religion of Its Inhabitants with a Full & Correct Account of the Druse Religion and Containing Historical Records of the Mountain Tribes from personal Intercourse with their Chiefs and other authentic Sources. London, Saunders and Ottley, 1853.
Three volumes, 8vo. Original grey-blue cloth, spines lettered in gilt, covers ornamented in blind; pp. [2], xx, 390, [2, colophon]; x, 398, [2, colophon]; x, 399, [2, advertisements], three lithographic portraits of Lebanese grandees, three tinted lithographic views of feudal compounds, one large folding lithographic map (a few repaired tears); bindings with restorations and faded spines, inner hinges strengthened, title pages with stamps of New Brunswick Theological Seminary Library, release stamps on front fly-leaves, one plate and adjacent text-page with yellow traces of old re-insertion, otherwise internally rather clean and fresh.
First edition, first printing (2 more 'editions' in the same year) of probably the most substantial 19th-century monograph on Lebanon. Churchill owned considerable property in the Lebanon and whilst this is not an account of his own time there, but rather 'an amalgamation of information, some of which is based on a Maronite chronology' (Atabey), it is the fullest nineteenth-century study of the Lebanon and the Lebanese in any language. Churchill-Bey, as he was known locally, was British Consul to Ottoman Syria, and is remembered as one of the first to suggest a modern Jewish state in Palestine.
Atabey 247 (mixed edition of 2nd and 3rd, lacking map); Blackmer 353 (3rd edition).
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