Introduction

I am glad to have had the opportunity to catalogue the Contominas collection. It is a pleasure as well as a challenge to catalogue new material, to add to one's store of knowledge, and to expand the jigsaw puzzle which makes up a picture of travel in the Levant. The Contominas collection is rich in books which I have not encountered before; in fact about half of the books in the library were new to me.

The Contominas library is a Greek library in the sense that the Gennadius Library is a 'Greek' library. As Gennadius said of his own library, it is "composed of works referring to Greece and its people of all epochs and in every aspect". This includes books which describe its relations with other nations. In his prologue Constantinos Staikos has mentioned a number of the subject categories and books which go to make up the collection, so I will content myself with references to a very few of the particularly rare or unusual items. These include Le Huen's adaptation of Breydenbach's pilgrimage to Jerusalem, constituting the first illustrated French book; the first printed account of Cyriac of Ancona's travels in the East; Carlo Widmann's extremely scarce account of the Ionian Islands; Pomardi's uncommon description of his travels with Dodwell; and Prejelan's album illustrating air combat and aviation in northern Greece and Thasos during the First World War.

Some of the books in the collection are old friends which I first encountered in the Blackmer or Atabey libraries, but even then there is something new to be learned: an unsuspected issue point, an unexpected variant in an imprint, a different state. In fact, these books, familiar though they are, are sometimes the most problematic. Among these we may number Clark's Peloponnesus, hardly an uncommon book, but the Contominas copy is unusual, with a variant title added to the original edition. Another ex- ample is George Rose's account of his travels on leave. This is not a common work, but the only copy I was able to locate, in the Gennadius Library, was also issued with a variant title added to the original sheets.

The catalogue is arranged alphabetically by author. If a number of works by the same author are listed, they will be in chronological order of publication, then each by date of publication of the individual work. Translations follow all publications of the editions in the original language. There are a number of duplicate copies of specific titles; these are mentioned at the end of the entry. The entry is made up of four parts: the title with its heading, the bibliographical description, the note, and the bibliographical references.

The Heading. The headings are formed either by the names of the author or authors, or by the first word of the title of an anonymous work. If the name of the author of an anonymously published book is known, the author's name is used in the heading, and the title of the book is cross-referenced in the index.