STARK, Freya. Letters from Syria. London, Murray, [August, 1946].
8vo. Original cloth, spine lettered in gilt, Freya Stark's signature in gilt on front cover, illustrated dust-wrapper (a little frayed at margins), price-clipped, but stamped price of 12s 6d inside front flap; pp. x, 194, sketch map, plates after photographs by the author and her travelling companion Venetia Buddicom; even browning and offsetting to ad from endpapers, a very good copy.
Second reprint (first printing November 1942) of one of Freya Stark's rarer titles. We believe that the war effort kept the printruns of this title rather small. These letters, dating from the late 1920s, report of Ms Stark's settlement in Brummana in the mountains east of Beirut, where she immersed herself in the local communitiy and perfected her Arabic, not only the speaking of, but the thinking in Arabic as well. She then stayed with a houshold in Damascus, before later setting out with her guide Najm, his small nephew and three donkeys travelling though the rough Jebel Druse country amd to Bosra in the the Hauran in Southern Syria, or Transjordania. In the preface, date Baghdad [1942] Frey Stark explains the history of the publication of this collection of letters, written 14 years earlier. 'These letters, written on my first coming to Asia, were neatly and dreamlessly at rest in in Sir John Murray' cupboard when, between one Blitz and another the Publisher's eye fell upon them' (p. ix). The letters were then edited by Sydney Cockerell.
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