STARK, Freya. A Winter in Arabia. London, John Murray, 1940.
8vo. Original green cloth, lettered in gilt; pp. xii, 328, [4, advertisements]; 2 single-page maps, 1 folding map, numerous illustrations from photographs by the author, printed in photogravure; binding with wear, and restored hinges, apart from the occasional very light spotting and offsetting from endpapers, a good copy.
First edition inscribed, signed and dated Cairo, January 7, 1942, on half-title. The author's beautifully illustrated account of her time in the Hadhramaut, dedicated to Doreen and Harold Ingrams. Freya Stark 'was awarded the Back grant from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and was the first woman to receive the Burton medal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her account of her journeys, The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), was an immediate success, and known for its elegant prose, lively wit, and observations of people' (Oxford DNB). - 'For additional Photographs of the Hadhramaut the reader can refer to the author's volume of Photographs Seen in the Hadhramaut' (p. ix).
Provenance: Printed bookplate 'This Book belongs to' with 'the Quilliams' filled in by hand. We could not establish whether these Quilliams are related to William Henry Quilliam, better known as Adullah Quilliam (1856-1932), the famous convert to Islam, who gained a large following up to the beginning of the 20th century. The Quilliam Foundation, a Muslim anti-radical Islamist think tank, is named after him.
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