Leo Africanus - A Geographical Historie of Africa, 1600 - First English Edition - James Grey Jackson's Personal Working Copy

LEO AFRICANUS. A Geographical Historie of Africa. First English Edition, 1600. James Grey Jackson's Verified Annotated Working Copy.

LEO AFRICANUS, Johannes [al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi]. A Geographical Historie of Africa, Written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie. Translated and collected by John Pory. London: Impensis Georg. Bishop, 1600. First edition in English. STC 15481; ESTC S108481.

A remarkable copy of one of the foundational English-language books on Africa: the first English edition of Leo Africanus' celebrated account, owned, studied and annotated by James Grey Jackson, author of An Account of the Empire of Marocco, and the District of Suse (1809). This is a volume in which the subject matter and the provenance are exceptionally closely aligned, connecting two important writers on Morocco, Timbuktu and the geography of Africa across more than two centuries.

Folio. Contemporary calf boards, dating from around the time of publication, sympathetically rebacked with the spine gilt in compartments and with red morocco lettering-piece. The original printed title page is lacking and has been replaced with a carefully written manuscript title page. No folding map is present in this copy; the map does not appear to have been issued with all examples of the edition and is not invariably found in surviving copies. With the struck-through ownership inscription and extensive manuscript annotations of James Grey Jackson, including a substantial Arabic passage independently verified as being in his hand.

Born al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, Leo Africanus was raised in Fez and travelled extensively through North Africa and territories further south. His account, first printed in Italian in Ramusio's collection of voyages in 1550, offered European readers one of the earliest substantial descriptions of Morocco, the Maghreb, Timbuktu and the wider African interior by a writer formed within the Islamic and African world he described.

This English translation by John Pory, published in London by George Bishop in 1600, was a landmark in the dissemination of knowledge about Africa in England. Pory added introductory geographical material and dedicated the work to Sir Robert Cecil. The book remained an important source for European readers and later travellers for centuries. The edition is credited by the OED with early English uses of the words "hippopotamus" and "zebra"; Ben Jonson referred expressly to "Leo the African" in his notes to The Masque of Blackness, while its possible relationship to Shakespeare's Othello has long attracted scholarly attention. Maggs similarly describes Pory's translation as a major landmark in the spread of knowledge of Africa in England.

The particular importance of this copy lies in its independently verified provenance. It was the personal working copy of James Grey Jackson, the British merchant, traveller and writer whose years in Morocco led to the publication of his influential Account of the Empire of Marocco. Jackson's struck-through ownership inscription survives within the volume, together with extensive manuscript material demonstrating sustained engagement with Leo Africanus' text.

Of exceptional interest is the lengthy Arabic annotation written by Jackson before the index, independently verified as being in his hand. The passage has been translated as:

"Then I entered the city of Tamkhazi and the country of Tamhazi is in the country of Cathay. Travellers claim that the wall surrounding their country and their lands and the rest of their buildings takes 23 days to traverse from west to east."

The passage appears to derive from the medieval Arabic geographical tradition associated with Ibn Sa'id al-Maghribi and the work now known as the Kitab al-Jughrafiya. The city rendered here as "Tamkhazi" is encountered elsewhere in Arabic geographical writing as Tamghach, associated with Central Asia or China. The linguistic irregularities in Jackson's Arabic add to the documentary interest of the inscription, preserving the active scholarly work of a learned non-native reader engaging directly with Arabic geographical source material.

The volume retains its contemporary calf boards, dating from around the time of publication, and has been sympathetically rebacked. It shows rubbing, wear and signs of use appropriate to a book that was consulted as a working reference. The original printed title page is lacking and replaced in manuscript. No folding map is present in this copy; the map does not appear to have accompanied all copies of the edition and is not invariably encountered in surviving examples.

An exceptionally significant copy of the first English edition of Leo Africanus, transformed by the verified ownership and Arabic annotations of James Grey Jackson into an important document of British engagement with Morocco, Arabic scholarship and the historical geography of Africa.