The only concession to the exotic is that he has a loosely tied turban as an item of nightwear. King Shahriyar looks very comfortable in his western-style four-poster bed as he sits up listening to stories told by Sheherazade. Since Coster had no notion of the medieval Islamic world as something alien and strange, his engravings depicted the characters in the stories in European dress. Each of the 12 volumes had a frontispiece by David Coster, a Dutch artist. Between 17 a series of pirate editions of Galland's translation were printed in the Hague. The Nights had a crucial role in shaping the origins and evolution not just of fantasy literature, but also of the realistic novel.Ĭopyright was not policed in the 18th century and books that were successful were almost invariably reissued in pirate editions. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Addison, Johnson and Goethe were among the 18th-century writers whose work was heavily influenced by the Nights. So translations of Galland into English, Italian, Russian and other languages soon followed. On the contrary, it was read and enthused over by courtiers and intellectuals in Versailles and Paris, and Versailles and Paris set the fashions for the rest of Europe.

His Les mille et une nuit was not received as a collection of children's stories (nor should it be). His translation, published in 12 volumes in the years 1704-17 was a raging success. The translation was well received and since Galland had been told that 'The Voyages of Sindbad' were part of a much larger collection of stories known as Alf Layla wa Layla, or 'The Thousand and One Nights', he located a three or four-volume manuscript of this work and set about translating it. In 1701 the orientalist and antiquarian Antoine Galland published a translation from Arabic into French of 'The Voyages of Sindbad'.

Only from the 19th century onwards did some illustrators try to get Arab buildings and costumes right. The first edition of The Arabian Nights had no pictures, and even when, in the late 18th century, fully illustrated editions began to be published, their illustrations gave little sense of the exotic medieval Arab environment in which the stories were set. These days, thanks to illustrated children's books, comics, films and video games, people are much more likely to have a sense of what the world of The Arabian Nightsshould look like than to have actual knowledge of the stories themselves. A lady on a divan telling stories to a turbaned sultan men with scimitars running down a dark and narrow street a jinni issuing like a vast dark cloud from a flask a prince in a pavilion guarded by lions a veiled lady at the entrance to a shop a young man on a flying carpet circling over a domed palace a man clinging to driftwood in a stormy sea.

Inferno illustrated edition