Ruins of Desert Cathay. Personal Narrative of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China. STEIN, Marc Aurel.

First edition, together with two autograph letters signed from Stein to his friend Frank Herbert Brown (1868-1959), the London correspondent for the Times of India. This handsomely produced book chronicles Stein's second expedition to Central Asia, undertaken between 1906 and 1908. The first autograph letter, dated 4 April 1917 and written from Devon, concerns Stein's progress with his writing: "I have been hard at work in this quiet retreat, but the tasks ahead are still big and claim every scrap of time." The second letter, dated 9 February 1920, describes the publication of a paper, written by Stein's assistant F. H. Andrews, on Chinese silks discovered by Stein in the Lop Desert, and it asks Brown to pass on information about the paper to Frances Morris, the curator of textiles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Stein also addresses the ongoing printing of his Serindia ("I hope to get this too of [sic] my hands by the early autumn"). Accompanying the letters is an unsigned file copy of a letter from Brown to Morris, typed on his Dilkusha letterhead. "Stein's best-known find came at Tunhuang in 1907, during his second expedition (financed by the government of India and the British Museum), when he reached the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Discovering thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and textiles walled up in a room in one of the caves, he bribed the custodian to part with many of them. Experts later found them to date from the fifth to tenth centuries AD. They included votive banners, Buddhist texts, and early secular works in a wide variety of scripts and languages, and a large, block-printed roll, dating from AD 868, which proved to be the world's oldest known printed book, a copy of the popular Buddhist work The Diamond Sutra" (ODNB). Howgego IV S65; Yakushi S331. 2 vols, octavo. Tissue-guarded frontispieces (Vol. I in colour), many plates (7 colour), 6 folding panoramas, 3 folding colour maps; each vol. with single leaf of publishers adverts at end. Original brown cloth, spines lettered in gilt, front cover with embossed gilt roundel, top edge gilt, others untrimmed. Newspaper clippings affixed to p. 130 of Vol. I and front free endpaper of Vol. II; traces of other removed newspaper clippings internally; near-contemporary ink ownership stamp of one J. C. G. Tibbs on half-titles. A few marks to cloth, spines toned, some offsetting from clippings, a few pages unopened, front inner hinge of Vol. II repaired: very good.