(London: Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883).

SCARCE SET IN SUCH FINE CONDITION AND one of the most famous English translations of "the most famous work of narrative fiction in existence," predating Burton's translation by a number of years. Edward William Lane (1801 – 1876) was a British orientalist, translator and lexicographer. He is known for his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians and the Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as his translations of One Thousand and One Nights and Selections from the Kur-án.
In Description of Egypt, Lane provided descriptions and histories of locations within Egypt that he had visited. He was a devout urban geographer, best illustrated by the fact that he devoted five chapters of the book writing about everything in Cairo: the way the city looks when you approach it, a detailed account of Old Cairo, monuments in the city, the nature around it, etc. He also wrote about rural areas. The book focuses mainly on Ancient Egypt. Though Lane was not credited as such during his lifetime, his text follows the form of Egyptology. The book included a supplement titled On the Ancient Egyptians in which Lane discusses the origin and physical characteristics of Egyptians, the origin of their civilization, hieroglyphics, Ancient Egyptian religion and law, Egyptian priesthood, Egyptian royalty, the caste system, general manners and customs, sacred architecture and sculpture, agriculture, and commerce.
At the suggestion of John Murray he expanded a chapter of the original project into a separate book. The result was his Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). Lane left detailed accounts of everyday life in Egypt in the 19th century, which would prove useful to later researchers.
His next major project was a translation of the One Thousand and One Nights. His version first saw light as a monthly serial from 1838 to 1840, and was published in three volumes in 1840. A revised edition was released in 1859. The encyclopedic annotations from the first edition were published posthumously and separately in 1883 by his great-nephew Stanley Lane-Poole, as Arabian Society in the Middle Ages. Lane's version was illustrated by William Harvey.
Stanley Lane-Poole commented that "Lane's version is markedly superior to any other that has appeared in English, if superiority is allowed to be measured by accuracy and an honest and unambitious desire to reproduce the authentic spirit as well as the letter of the original." Lane himself saw the Nights as an edifying work, as he had expressed earlier in a note in his preface to the Manners and Customs,
There is one work, however, which represents most admirable pictures of the manners and customs of the Arabs, and particularly of those of the Egyptians; it is 'The Thousand and One Nights; or, Arabian Nights' Entertainments:' if the English reader had possessed a close translation of it with sufficient illustrative notes, I might almost have spared myself the labour of the present undertaking.' E.W. Lane

. Item #34749

3 volumes. Early Edition of Lane's Famous Translation, this from a copy annotated by the translator, edited by his nephew Edward Stanley Poole and with a preface by Stanley Lane Poole. With an engraved title-page to each volume and profusely illustrated throughout by many hundred engravings on wood from original designs by William Harvey. Royal 8vo, handsomely bound in the publisher's original decorated cloth, the spines lettered and beautifully decorated in gilt, red and black, the upper covers decorated in all-over pictorial designs in black, red and gilt, the lower cover with central floral device in red and ruled in black at the upper and lower borders. xxx, 555; xii,578; xii, 701, [1], 32 ads. pp. An especially handsome and beautifully preserved set in original state. The bindings in unusually fine condition, strong, tight, bright and clean and with virtually no evidence of wear or use, the text-blocks are clean and fresh and very nice indeed with a minor touch of spotting encountered only very occasionally, an unusually pleasing survival of an important set rarely seen in such condition.