The Arabian Nights

This framed collection of medieval Arabic tales, assembled over centuries and circulating in something like its present form by the fourteenth century, opens with King Shahriyar's resolve to marry and kill a wife each day. Shahrazad delays her death by telling linked stories that never quite finish at dawn. Nested narratives move through Baghdad, Cairo, the sea, and the islands of jinn: merchants, porters, caliphs in disguise, jealous sisters, and voyagers such as Sindbad. Later European versions added Aladdin and Ali Baba. The book is a story-cycle about desire, justice, and narrative as survival, not a single novel and not a history of the Abbasid court.

Bound in white cloth blocked with a gilt design. Earlier printings were in a gold slipcase; later ones in a red slipcase.