Description

8vo., First Edition, with frontispiece, title-vignette, 7 plates, woodcut illustrations in the text and full-page colour map; original maroon cloth, upper board and backstrip lettered in gilt, chocolate endpapers, uncut, backstrip lightly chafed at head and tail else a near fine copy. With the nineteenth century engraved armorial bookplate of T.V. Scudamore on front paste-down, and 24pp publisher's catalogue (January 1887) bound in at end. The frontispiece has been mounted on front free endpaper verso; the plate 'Monastery of St. Paul', called for at p.217, is placed at p.223. THIS VOLUME REMAINS THE ONLY SUBSTANTIAL WORK IN ENGLISH dedicated to the Athos peninsula, its monasteries and its monks. The author, who lived with the monks of several monasteries during the 1880s, records its ecclesiastical history throughout the Byzantine and Ottoman periods to its present status as an independent Greek state. EXTREMELY SCARCE.