Some Desert Flowers collected near Cairo
Cairo, F. Diemer (printed by John Swain & Son, Ltd., London), [1914].
Quarto, 50, [2] (blank, colophon) pages with a frontispiece portrait and 34 full-page botanical illustrations (from photographs by the author).
Cord-bound flush-cut card lightly rubbed at the extremities; essentially a fine copy.
Provenance: 'Chas. Barrett. Cairo, 24/5/18' is written in ink on the inside front cover. Charles Leslie Barrett (1879-1959), naturalist and journalist, enlisted in June 1916 'in the Australian Imperial Force and joined the Camel Brigade Field Ambulance which left for Egypt in May 1917. He edited an issue of the Field Ambulance's journal, "Cacolet", and in April-December 1918 the monthly "Kia-ora Coo-ee". A visit to the Nile valley left him with a lifelong interest in Egypt' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). This Cairo imprint of a parochial natural history title ticks a lot of those boxes. The issues of the wartime journals mentioned were all published in Cairo ('The Cacolet' in 1917). For the record, we have discovered that before he embarked for the Middle East, Private Barrett edited 'The Stretcher. Journal of the Camel Brigade Field Ambulance' (First Number, March, 1917; Second Number, April, 1917), which then became 'The Cacolet'. The second (and last) issue under that title, published in Cairo in 1918, was edited by Tom Brennan. Last, but not least, Grace Mary Crowfoot (1879-1957) spent the years 1909-1935 in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine. This book is the first she produced on the botany of these regions: 'in subsequent publications she reverted to line-drawings of her own, feeling that photographs could not represent with sufficient accuracy and clarity the detail of particular plants and flowers'. More importantly, she was a pioneer in the study of archaeological textiles, and an early campaigner against female genital mutilation in Sudan (Wikipedia).
Item #118406
Price (AUD):
$200.00