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92.
Hashish.
London: Quartet Books, 1984. First edition. Lge. 4to. Black cloth, embossed with a marijuana leaf on the upper board. Unpaginated.
Beautifully illustrated throughout with colour photographs from Lebanon and Nepal by Suomi La Valle, accompanied by a scholarly text by John Julius Norwich, who had lived for three years in Lebanon (and first tried hashish when he was with the British Embassy in Beirut in the early 1960s): “My own purpose will be to try to put this extraordinary plant in its historical and literary perspective: to assess the effects – political, cultural and even etymological – that it has had over the two and half thousand years or so that have elapsed since its peculiar properties were first discovered; and finally perhaps to remove at least some of the mystique that – among those who have no direct experience of it – has surrounded it for so long.”
A well-preserved copy of this sumptuous production. Near Fine in dw.
