Estate / Collection: The Property of a New England Family

[MANUSCRIPT - TRAVEL]
Our Journey Up the Nile. December, 1908. A typewritten manuscript journal with pasted-down illustrations taken from books, post cards, and an original photograph, recounting an anonymous American tourist and his wife's ten-day yacht trip up the Nile from Cairo to Aswan. Full leatherette, typewritten label pasted to upper board. 8 x 5 1/2 inches (20.25 x 14 cm); approximately 36 unnumbered leaves typewritten on rectos only, illustrated with approximately 13 cut illustrations, 2 postcards, and an original sepia photographic print of the author and his wife riding camels. Rubbing and wear to extremities, label toned and chipped, cracks starting along leatherette at joints, front hinge cracked but sound, contents with numerous corrections in both manuscript and typewritten overlays, photograph quite faded.

The homemade travel journal for an American tourist and his wife's trip through Egypt. He recounts the various donkey excursions to a number of archaeological sites, and comments on the Egyptians and his fellow travellers. A notable moment in the journal happens while visiting a temple in Asyut - the guides bring out mummies for the tourist party, that are then, "fondled by an English lady." Once outside the temple, the ground was "full of bones... [and so] one man secured part of a skull... [and] I picked up part of a lady's finger said to be five thousand years old, this I sent to America."