• Title: Travels in Siberia: Including Excursions Northwards, Down the Obi, to the Polar Circle, and, Southwards, to the Chinese Frontier. (2 volumes complete)
• Author: Adolph Erman.
• Publisher: Lea and Blanchard, Philadelphia.
• Publication Date: 1850, first American edition.
• Format: hardcover; original cloth; blind-stamped decoration; gilt titles on spine.
• Length: Vol I: 371 pp, plus 42 page publisher's catalogue; Vol. II: 400 pp.
• Size: approximately 5 1/4" by 7 7/8".
• Description: Account by German scientist and explorer Adolph Erman, who was a member of a 1828-29 Norwegian expedition to Russia and Siberia to study the north magnetic pole. Erman’s work includes important comments and observations on physical geography and geology, the exile road to Siberia, Irkutsk, the chief political exile city, the manners, customs, and language of the Samoyedes and Yakuts, the trade carried on from the frontiers of Siberia to Bokhara and Tashkend, the fisheries of the Obi, the mineral riches of the Ural and Nerchinsk, the fossil ivory in the valley of the Lena and New Siberia, etc. Erman was awarded the medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1844, and the magnetic observations he made during his travels were utilized by C.F.Gauss in his theory of terrestrial magnetism.
• Provenance: Stamps and labels indicate that this two volume set once belonged to a literary society in Salem, Forsyth County, North Carolina. Originally founded in 1854 as The Forsyth Literary Society (book plate on inside covers); prior to 1888 renamed The Salem Literary Society (ink stamp on inside cover); even later appears to have become the Young Men’s Library, Salem (written in ink along the bottom page edges).
• Condition: Ex-library with expected labels and markings. The bindings are sound. The cover of Volume I shows some wear and the top and bottom of its spine are frayed. The pages in both volumes are toned and foxed. Some of the pages in both volumes have bumped corners.