The Thousand and One Nights Commonly Called The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, in Three Volumes [Lane's Arabian Nights]

London: Chatto & Windus, 1912. Hard Cover. Very Good/No Jacket. Harvey, William. Loss from spine ends, pages lightly foxed, ink name on front endpaper. 1912 Hard Cover. xxx, 555; xii, 578; xii, 701 pp. Three volume set. Green cloth boards with gilt titles on spine; top edge gilt. Translated from the Arabic, with copious notes, by Edward William Lane. Edited by his nephew Edward Stanley Poole. With a preface by Stanley Lane-Pool. Illustrations from the designs of William Harvey. The Thousand and One Nights, also called The Arabian Nights, Arabic Alf laylah wa laylah, collection of largely Middle Eastern and Indian stories of uncertain date and authorship. Its tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba, and Sindbad the Sailor have almost become part of Western folklore, though these were added to the collection only in the 18th century in European adaptations. As in much medieval European literature, the stories—fairy tales, romances, legends, fables, parables, anecdotes, and exotic or realistic adventures—are set within a frame story. Its scene is Central Asia or “the islands or peninsulae of India and China,” where King Shahryar, after discovering that during his absences his wife has been regularly unfaithful, kills her and those with whom she has betrayed him. Then, loathing all womankind, he marries and kills a new wife each day until no more candidates can be found. His vizier, however, has two daughters, Shahrazad (Scheherazade) and Dunyazad; and the elder, Shahrazad, having devised a scheme to save herself and others, insists that her father give her in marriage to the king. Each evening she tells a story, leaving it incomplete and promising to finish it the following night. The stories are so entertaining, and the king so eager to hear the end, that he puts off her execution from day to day and finally abandons his cruel plan. Though the names of its chief characters are Iranian, the frame story is probably Indian, and the largest proportion of names is Arabic. The tales’ variety and geographical range of origin—India, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, and possibly Greece—make single authorship unlikely; this view is supported by internal evidence—the style, mainly unstudied and unaffected, contains colloquialisms and even grammatical errors such as no professional Arabic writer would allow.