The Encyclopedia of Exploration. Complete Set in Five Volumes. Vol 1.A comprehensive reference guide to the history and literature of exploration, travel and colonization from the earliest times to the year 1800. Vol.2 The years 1800 to 1850. Vol3. Continental Exploration, 1850-1940. Vol 4. Colonization in the oceans, the islands, New Zealand and the polar regions and Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas from 1850 to 1940. Vol. 5. Invented and Apochryphal Narratives of Travel (Imaginary Voyages and Invented Worlds).

Sydney: Hordern House, 2010-13. . Five volumes, quarto, bound in cloth with colour dust jackets. .xv, 1168 + xi, 690 + x, 724 + xii, 1047 pp,. and xii, 544pp. A fine unused set.. First editions. The vast scope of the Encyclopedia of Exploration makes it a work unlike any other in its combination of historical, biographical and bibliographical data. It includes a catalogue of all known expeditions, voyages and travels from the earliest times to the year 1940, as well as biographical information of the travellers themselves, which places them in their historical context. Over fifteen years in the making, the Encyclopedia of Exploration has been a massive undertaking. The five volumes include over 5100 articles in approximately 4203 pages, some 4 million words. Within the text itself there are many thousands of cross-references between articles, and the work is made even more accessible through extensive bibliographical citations to accompany the articles.Raymond Howgego is an independent researcher, scholar and traveller, who has been researching the history of exploration for much of his adult life. His travels have followed in the footsteps of the explorers to most parts of the world - Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, West Africa, South America, the Cape Verde Islands, Uganda and Ethiopia; and more recently overland from China to Tibet and across the length and breadth of Australia. His numerous excursions in search of local sources of information have afforded the opportunity to add to a lifetime's accumulation of travel literature. He has recently been appointed to the Council of the Hakluyt Society. Brian Turner noted in a recent article on the Encyclopedia that 'The soft-spoken physicist turned travel-scholar speaks and speed-reads every European language (except Basque and Finnish) plus Arabic, and has translated into English many travel narratives himself. Howgego is also a great serial traveller; he has stood at the same spot as Speke at the source of the Nile, sailed through the Straits of Magellan, and followed the tracks of the Conquistadors through Bolivia. In 1994 Howgego and his companions were the first Europeans to cross the Torugart Pass from Kyrgyzstan into China since the Russian Revolution. Minutes after his jeep had crossed an unstable section of Pakistan's precipitous Karakoram Highway, the road collapsed into the Indus. Ray has also voyaged down most of the world's great rivers, including the Niger in flood, when neither bank was visible. His favourite destination? "Kashgar is my centre of the universe". And favourite country? "Iran; the Zoroastrian monasteries of central Iran fascinate me and the Islamic architecture of Esfahan is heart-stoppingly beautiful"'. 2010 [ From the Publisher's description of the work]. Please apply to the Bookseller for an accurate quotation of freight cost.