Marco Polo The Description of the World A.C. Moule & Paul Pelliot Volume 1

The Bookook of Marco Polo can be read for entertainment, as a historical and geographical source, or as an exercise in literary scholarship. The original has been lost, and no one of the significantly different manuscripts and editions in French, Italo-French, various dialects of Italian, and Latin can be regarded as definitive. In this book Moule and Pelliot have produced a composite translation by comparing eighteen different versions. The result may read a little more clumsily than some of the partial versions, but you don't miss anything.The first printing of this book has been out of print for decades and I have not seen it on sale for less than $500. There has to be a backstory about how the publisher got the rights to the book; Sam Sloan's foreword is not very helpful on that point and consists mostly of odd bits of personal knowledge.This is a nice, big, well-made book and a good buy for the price. I deducted one star because the photocopying of the original was badly done and the text is visually very poor. For the common reader with a strong interest in Marco Polo Yule's 19th century version (published by Dover) is probably still the best because of the large number of notes on peripheral topics (e.g., the Venetian navy). However, if accuracy is important, this translation benefits from another century of scholarship, including Pelliot and Moule's own careful work, and is presumably better in that respect. (Hambis's French version, "Le devisement du monde", is based on Moule and Pelliot's work and should also be good.)For the real Polo buff, Pelliot's intimidating three-volume "Notes on Marco Polo" and Moule's "Quinsai" tell you even more about the Chinese, Persian, Turkish, and Mongol (and even Armenian and Syriac) background of Polo's book.

As the previous reviewer said, the text is indeed visually poor. It seems to have been printed in grayscale, so there is this gray shading between the words. Imagine trying to read something without your glasses - that is what this text is like. Had this been apparent in the preview, I likely would have not purchased the book.