Baghdad in the 1880’s, in case you are curious.

As university libraries desperately look for space to hold old and rarely used volumes, many books fall by the wayside. My university holds an annual sale in which most of the books being discarded deserve to be. But then there are the occasional old and rare books that I cannot bear knowing will end up in a dumpster or landfill. One of these that I recently picked up for a dollar was Geographische Charakterbilder aus Asien. Aus den Originalberichten der Reisenden gesammelt von Dr. Berthold Volz mit 87 Illustrationen (Leipzig, Fues’s Verlag, 1887, 384 pages). The discursive Althochdeutsch aside, this text is a bit of print paradise for the lover of 19th century lithographs, all 87 of them.

Herr Volz provides a series of excerpts from travelers, one of these being “Bagdad und seine Umgebung” by Joseph Szernik, who appears to have visited Baghdad in the early 1880s, although I have not found any bibliographic information about the author. Szernik estimates that the population of Baghdad at the time was about 60,000 (p. 40), mostly Arab, but under the control of Turkish military. Its description here seems more like a large village with extensive gardens than a small city, an ironic fate for the once splendid capital of the caliphate. But let the illustrations tell the story.