A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road

(Time of Gifts) [frontispiece] [8] pp 1-291 [1] (Woods and Water) [10] pp 11-248 (Broken Road) xxii, pp 1-362. The three volumes in first edition of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his epic walk to Constantinople, now seen as one of the great travel books of the twentieth century and only completed in 2013 with the publication of the third volume, The Broken Road. All three books are first editions in their jackets, the earlier books additionally protected by a non-adhesive clear covering over the DJs.

A Time of Gifts is about fine in a very good jacket with very slight foxing to the inside of rear dust jacket flap and very slight discolouration to folds. Laid in are 2 contemporary newspaper cuttings reviewing the book, one by Frederic Raphael and another by Philip Toynbee. Between the Woods and the Water is also near fine in a very good jacket which has no rips or tears, the front panel beautifully bright, the rear a little thumb marked. Laid in are 2 contemporary newspaper cuttings reviewing the book, one by Brian Fallon and another by Peter Quennell. The Broken Road is mint.

It was Leigh Fermor's good fortune to set out on his great adventure in the early nineteen thirties before Nazism and the Second World War changed Europe for ever, but to wait forty years before writing the first two volumes of his luminous narrative. His account of German beer cellars, of Prague under snow and love in Vienna, all occurring while the shadow of Nazism looms, bears comparison with Chatwin, Robert Byron and the greatest of travel writers.