How I Found Livingstone – Henry M Stanley

Condition : Good.
Time Life (Classics of Exploration Series), 1984, Leather Hardback – Classics – 8vo (22cm by 14cm), xxiii, 736pp. Plates, 5 maps, largely folding, woodcuts (illustrator), appendix, glossary, index. Leather binding with raised banding to spine and Red / gold decoration and lettering. With yellow silk-ribbon bookmark, and Marbled endpapers. All edges gilt. Time Life also issued a biographical information sheet and book plate with each volume. These are loosely inserted. In Mint condition. An Essential series for any serious collector.

How I Found Livingstone: Travels, Adventures and Discoveries in Central Africa: Including an Account of Four Months’ Residence with Dr. Livingstone — Henry M. Stanley.

This leather-bound volume has been photographically reproduced from the first edition published in 1872 and thus preserves the historical authenticity of the work.

Henry Morton Stanley GCB was a Welsh journalist and explorer famous for his exploration of central Africa and his search for missionary and explorer David Livingstone. How I Found Livingstone is Stanley’s personnel account of his trip from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika on this quest, including time spent exploring the area with Livingstone.

How I Found Livingstone is not only a great chapter in the exploration of Africa, but a classic of journalism, too. Stanley’s encounter was one of the greatest scoops in history. His greatest weakness – his ignorance of the business of exploration – turned into an advantage. He saw everything with a fresh eye, and he described it with an enthusiastic lucidity. How he mounted his expedition from the island of Zanzibar, how he launched it into the interior: his account could have been a guide for his successors. He bribed and negotiated his way through hostile or suspicious tribes, but his diplomacy was always backed by his rifle.

When they met, in November 1871, at the village of Ujiji, his quarry was ill and perilously low in supplies of all kinds. In his own journal, Livingstone wrote: ‘But when my spirits were at their lowest ebb, the Good Samaritan was at hand.'”