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Rare - a seminal map used for strategic planning by German commanders during the Sinai and Levant theatre of World War I, a classified work created under the supervision of the orientalist Franz Gustav Taeschner for the German General Staff, it depicts all details necessary to inform broad military movement during one of the most dramatic and surprising campaigns of…

8°. 111 pp., portrait with red printing and lettering in margins, 20th century dark brown cloth binding with lettering on the cover and spine (minor foxing, hand-written old price on the inner side of back cover, one white margin trimmed, an old typed title mounted on the title page, otherwise in a good condition).

This is a rare first edition of a highly influential first separately published Ottoman work on the Kurds, written under a false name of a German scientist by an Albanian author in the time of the last years of the Ottoman Empire. The text, which diminishes the Kurdish minority, played a major role in the formation of the Turkish opinion…

  12°. 88 pp., original front cover with lettering, 20th century brown cloth binding with lettering on the cover and spine (minor foxing, hand-written old price on the inner side of back cover, otherwise in a good condition).

12°: [2] blank, 135 pp., folding map, original printed cover, bound in a mid-20th century brown cloth binding with lettering on the cover and spine, old typed annotations on the inner side of the back cover (old hand-written price on the inner side of the back cover, map with minor tears in margins and pin-size holes on the crossings of…

Chromolithograph. 9 x 13,5 cm (3.5 x 5.3 inches). Minor staining, overall in a good condition.

A stellar and unique artefact of World War I in the Middle East - an advanced topographical map of north-western Syria and the adjacent parts of Anatolia issued by the German Army in May 1918, with extensive contemporary manuscript additions in coloured crayon added by an Ottoman officer depicting the key military actions during the Battle of Aleppo and the…

A complete set of the contemporary Ottoman translations of Schweinfurth’s influential travelogue to Africa. 8°: 911 pp. with black and white illustrations, folding map, coloured in outline, one toned lithograph with hand coloured details, contemporary Ottoman black calf with gilt and debossed decoration (remboîtage in a contemporary Ottoman binding) (minor age-toning and foxing, holes in the map on the crossings…

  Very rare and historically important – the most detailed and accurate Ottoman map of the Kuwait and the Basra region of Iraq, issued by the General Staff of the Ottoman Army for strategic and operational planning early in World War I and during the twilight of the reign of Sheikh Mubarak Al Sabah, the ‘Father of Modern Kuwait’; depicting…

  A rare publication by a leader of the extremist nationalist Turkestani movement in Berlin Mustafa Shokay, who eventually sided with the Nazis with a goal to unify Turkestan during the WWII, describes the revolutionary year 1917. 8°. 96 pp with black and white portraits, later black cloth binding with lettering on the cover and spine, pink endpapers (sporadic small…

  A rare translation of Lenin’s texts on the unification and protection of the Muslims in the Soviet Union was published in Tashkent and Samarkand in 1926. Small 4°. 195 pp. with a portrait of Lenin, [5 pp.], 20th century brown cloth binding with lettering on the cover and spine (minor age-toning, handwritten old price on the inner side of…

A rare work on Turkestan was written in Arabic and published in Jedda.   8°. 42 pp. with double-page map of Asia, original blue front wrapper with lettering, later blank rear wrapper, imprint from the original blue rear blank wrapper pasted under the index on p. 41 (p. 5-6 with trimmed outer white margin and tiny repaired tears, light staining…

  An elegant pamphlet in Arabic language with an elegy for Ahmad, a son of sultan of Morocco Abd al-Rahman from the Alaouite dynasty, was lithographed in gold in Istanbul.   8°. 12 pp., original wrappers with lettering, all pages lithographed in gold, elegant modern calf with debossed ornaments to contemporary style, bound with old marbled wrappers, modern yellow endpaper…

Hikmet’s fierce attack on the Nazi Germany   N.B. The image of the book provided here censors out the Nazi symbol of the Swastika from the title page; this has been done pursuant to German laws on the representation of Third Reich symbols; however, such details are clearly present and uncensored on the actual book itself.   8°. 96 pp., inserted…

The second edition of Nazim Hikmet’s fine avantgarde poetry book from 1929 was republished with a different cover, made by a poster and book designer Ali Suavi (1910 or 1913-1994), who was more known as an award-winning photographer Suavi Sonar.   8°. 48 pp., original illustrated wrappers (a tiny worm-hole in the outer white margin of the first half of…

  A 1778 manuscript map of the Spanish fortification Peñón de Alhucemas, off the Moroccan coast, was made by a North German officer and engineer Philip Ernst Colson.

A stellar, large format, original manuscript map of the telegraph system in the Ottoman Balkans, specifically in modern Greece, Northern Macedonia and Albania; with text entirely in Ottoman Turkish, it was drafted in 1889 seemingly as working document by the governmental administration that managed the empire’s telegraph network – an extraordinary survivor documenting a critical medium that revolutionized society during…

The seminal map of the Baghdad region used by British Imperial forces during World War I’s Mesopotamian Campaign for operational planning during their two attempts to take the Iraqi capital, being the extremely rare ‘Degree Sheet’ survey of the area predicated upon the best available sources, published in 1915 in Calcutta by the Survey of India on the orders of…

A fascinating large format map of greater Beirut made by the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency to aid the CIA and the American military early in the Lebanese Civil War when the city was a hotbed of espionage and major faultline in the Cold War; an extremely accurate and detailed depiction based upon satellite reconnaissance, it labels every major building, street…

A rare master plan of Piraeus, the port of Athens, made during the Roaring ‘20s when the city was undergoing a dramatic transformation towards becoming one of the world’s great commercial and a passenger ports, detailing every block, major building and site, as well as outlining the new neighbourhoods that were in the process of being developed north of the…

  The first edition of the first scientific geological map of North Yemen, officially the Yemen Arab Republic (centred on its capital Sana’a), a country that existed between 1967 and 1990, until Yemen was unified; a highly sophisticated work published on 4 large, brightly coloured sheets in Hannover by West Germany’s Federal Institute of Geosciences and Natural Resources, predicated upon…

The final wartime issue of the most famous Slovenian Partisan newspaper, ‘Delo’, printed by an underground press in Italian-occupied Ljubljana, with a magnificently illustrated cover, was printed in a secret room in the building of the Fascist police station.   8°. 34 pp., original wrappers with illustrated cover printed in red, stapled (Very Good, staples slightly soiled, slightly stained, tiny…

8°. 95 pp., original pictorial wrappers, staple bound (worn on the edges, otherwise in a good condition).