Voyage de M Le Vaillant dans L'Interieur de l'Afrique...

Still one of the cornerstones of South African travel writing. Early French octavo edition of this famous work by the intrepid French explorer (Ogilvie No 5). The author's party meandered from Cape Town to the Eastern Cape near present-day Tarkastad, then returned by a more inland route across the Karoo, collecting specimens of natural history interest. Described with the irrepressible enthusiasm of a young man out in the wilds. French text.

383 + 403 pp, frontispiece, 11 plates, of which two are folding (one has a small tear at a fold). The 'Hottentot Venus' plate, which is frequently censored, is included in this edition. In full contemporary calf but re-backed with fragments of the original spine laid down, rather unsuccessfully. The textblocks are generally clean and free of foxing, but a few pages in the prelims and a few of the plates have a few spots of foxing, nothing severe. In both volumes there are a few pages (5 in all) which have pieces torn from the margins, possbly by rough slitting; there are a number of unslit pages; p 161, vol 2 has a blotch of detritus on it, and some twelve pages in vol 1 are badly sewn and are loose at the bottom half in the gutter. Name and bookplate on endpapers.