[EARLY COMPLETE SET OF THE ARABIAN NIGHTS] Binbir gece masallari. [i.e. One thousand and one nights, Arabian nights, or Alf laila wa laila]. 22 books set

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ARABIAN NIGHTS, Resimli Ay Nesriyâti / Resimli Ay Matbaasi, Istanbul, (1927-1928).

Original pictorial wrappers. Foolscap 8vo. (17 x 12 cm). In Ottoman script (Old Turkish with Arabic letters). 22 books set: (1404, [4] p.), b/w ills.

First edition thus. Extremely rare togetherness of this complete set of the early Turkish edition of One Thousand and One Nights, including a popular compilation of tales in twenty-two books. This edition has no indication of a compiler or an author. Except for the first two books, the cover of each book is illustrated.

Resimli Ay [i.e. Illustrated Moon] is a printing house of the publishing house, which was founded together with the magazine of the same name, published by Sabiha Sertel (1895-1968) and Zekeriya Sertel (1890-1980) between 1924 and 1931. In addition to the magazine with the same name, this publishing house printed many literary, political, and intellectual books that made the propaganda of the New Republic and many popular books in this period.

is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (c. 1706-1721), which rendered the title The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central and South Asia, and North Africa. Some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Egyptian, Sanskrit, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature. Many tales were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezar Afsana (Persian: A Thousand Tales), which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.

Common to all the editions of the Nights is the framing device of the story of the ruler Shahryâr being narrated the tales by his wife Scheherazade. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while some are self-contained. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights, while others include 1001 or more. The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is occasionally used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single couplets or quatrains, although some are longer.

Some of the stories commonly associated with the Arabian Nights-particularly "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves"-were not part of the collection in its original Arabic versions but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland after he heard them from the Syrian Maronite Christian storyteller Hanna Diab on Diab's visit to Paris. Other stories, such as "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", had an independent existence before being added to the collection. (Wikipedia).

Tülücü p. 12; DIA (Binbir Gece); Özege 2038; TBTK 6211.