BURTON, Richard Francis, Sir (1821-1890). Goa, and the Blue Mountains; Or, Six Months of Sick Leave. London: Samuel Bentley & Co. for Richard Bentley, 1851.

8vo (196 x 121). Half-title, 4 tinted lithographic plates (including frontispiece) and folding lithographic map printed by Hullmandel & Walton after drawings by Burton. (Upper corner of half-title clipped, some toning and occasional spotting.) Original light blue cloth, decorated in blind, spine gilt-lettered, edges uncut and partially unopened (spine sunned, hinges starting, slight wear to extremities). Provenance: Thomas Barbour (1884-1946), American herpetologist (armorial bookplate).

FIRST EDITION, second issue, OF BURTON’S FIRST BOOK. IN THE REMAINDER BINDING more elaborately blind-stamped, and with the plates rearranged with “View of Old Goa” facing p. 58. While on sick leave from the British Indian Army after contracting rheumatic ophthalmia in 1846, Burton traveled throughout the Malabar coast to the Nilgiri Mountains, and onto the Portuguese colony of Goa (present-day southwest India). “It shows Burton’s early development as a travel writer and bears all the hallmarks of his efforts in this genre” (Cassada 37). Penzer, pp.37-38; Spink 1.

Property from the Collection of Robert S. Brown, Cincinnati, Ohio

BURTON, Richard Francis, Sir (1821-1890). Goa, and the Blue Mountains; Or, Six Months of Sick Leave. London: Samuel Bentley & Co. for Richard Bentley, 1851.

BURTON, Richard Francis, Sir (1821-1890). Goa, and the Blue Mountains; Or, Six Months of Sick Leave. London: Samuel Bentley & Co. for Richard Bentley, 1851.