In recording his journey he created what is now generally recognised as a masterpiece of twentieth century travelogue. In 1933, aged 18, he set out to walk from Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Paddy Leigh Fermor's vivid account of his personal odyssey. (1977) Between the Woods and the Water: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986) The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos (2013). On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube.
Spot to title and contents page else fine, in near-fine, price-clipped jacket, bright and fresh, a hint of soiling.ģ vols., 8vo., First Edition, with fine portrait frontispiece, second portrait and 4 maps (2 double-page on coloured stock), third volume with patterned endpapers cloth (blue/blue/grey respectively), first two volumes with upper boards and backstrips blocked and lettred in gilt, third volume with backstrip lettered in silver, fore-edges very faintly spotted else a near fine set in dustwrapper. With photographic portrait frontispiece, and a two-page map. With dust jacket designed by John Craxton. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, decoration to front cover in gilt.
This copy retains the original dust jacket designed by John Craxton, "one of the leading exponents of Neo-Romanticism" (Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists). Part antiquarian pilgrimage through a Europe that was being changed irrevocably by National Socialism, part adolescent coming-of-age adventure, A Time of Gifts, relating the first part of Fermor's journey as far as Hungary, is undoubtedly the author's masterpiece. This is the first book in Fermor's celebrated travel trilogy that recounts his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, an immediate bestseller and critical success which established him as "one of the greatest travel writers of the twentieth century" (ODNB).
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