Only published edition of the original version of the Kitâb-I Bahriyye (Book of the sea) by the great Ottoman navigator and cartographer Piri Reis (1465/79-1553). In 1513 he made an important map that still survives, including the European, African and North and South American Atlantic coasts based on numerous sources, including a lost map drawn by Columbus. He then decided to collect "all his own observations and all previous information that he could not fit onto the maps" in a book. "It is basically a naval guidebook with essential data on the most important coastal routes and large maps and detailed charts ... The main portion of the book is devoted to the Mediterranean coasts and islands. ... Piri first gives historical and geographical information and then discusses the necessary practical navigational data. The accuracy of many of his statements is indisputable." (DSB). The final chapter of the book describes the supposed newly discovered continent or island Antilia "the mountains of which contain rich gold ores and in the seas, pearls ... The chapter on the Western Sea contains all that was known about the discovery of America at the time" (DSB). In his 1513 map, Piri had made Antilla, first described in 1424 in the mid-Atlantic, an island off the coast of North America, the earliest of many speculations that it may derive from pre-Columbian voyages to America.
First written in 1521, the manuscript was reworked in 1526 for presentation to sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. This later manuscript was published twice, in 1935 and 1998, but Piri's original version is still available only in the current edition by the German scholar Paul Kahle (1875-1961). The first volume (in two bindings) is a facsimile of a manuscript in Bologna containing Piri Reis's 1521 text, with a few pages added from a manuscript in Dresden. The second volume is an annotated German translation of the text, based on these manuscripts as well as on a manuscript in Vienna. This is still considered the best translation of the Bahriyye.
Bindings slightly soiled, with the spines discoloured and slightly damaged; covers of the second part of vol. 1 almost completely loose but the bookblock still structurally sound. In good condition, with vol. 2 still unopened. DSB X, pp. 616-619; Howgego, to 1800, P104; Lepore, Piccardi, Rombai, "Looking at the Kitab-i Bahriye of Piri Reis", in: e-Perimetron VIII, no. 2 (2013), pp. 85-94; Lowry, "Pîrî Reis Revisited", in: Journal of Ottoman studies XXXV (2010), pp. 7-31.