A Voyage to the Hebrides, or Western Isles of Scotland: with observations on the Manners and Customs of the Highlanders.
Year: 1822
Edition: First thus
Publisher: London, Richard Phillips
Category: Europe
8vo, iv, 116pp. With an aquatint frontispiece and three other aquatints. Brown cloth over marbled boards.
An interesting and scarce account of the Scottish Highlands at the turn of the 19th century published in 1822.
As with many of the travel and exploration books published by Richard Phillips between 1819 and 1823, this book also was to become part of “New Voyages and Travels.”
These publications appeared in wrappers with the intention to have several of them to be bound together into larger volumes. Both the issues still in the original wrappers and the bound together editions are rather scarce. In recent years several of the larger volumes have been broken down. The various parts thus obtained then usually were bound in modern bindings, sometimes described as: “Handsome period style binding”, while in most cases these bindings actually are quite cheap due to the value of the book. This is the case here too. Yet, this book both is scarce and interesting. The engravings, a frontispiece and 3 others, give a good impression of the Hebrides at the beginning of the 19th century. Missing 1 plate, titled: "The Scour of Eigg from the South-East". "Fingal's Cave", "Stirling Castle", "Inverary" and "The Scour of Eigg from the East" are all present.
Although M. de Saussure is mainly known as a geologist, this is quite an interesting book. There is some very light foxing on the plates, while the text is clean.. Furthermore there is some offsetting from the plates to the text (as usual), some edgewear, there is one small closed tear each in the margins of page 50 and page 84. Moreover the plates are bound in at the wrong places.
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