Series:Arabian Nights
| This is an ISFDB Bibliographic Comments page for the Arabian Nights series. This page may be used for a list of the titles in the series, bibliographic comments or extended notes about the series, or discussion on how to organize and/or record the works in the series. The link above leads to the ISFDB series record for Arabian Nights. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page.
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The stories that become the Arabian Nights developed during the 8th-12th century. The oldest extant version known is a 14th or 15th Syrian edition in the Bibliothèque National (France). The first translation into a European language was the Galland translation (of this Syrian version) into French in 1704, and is used to give the date listed for the first title in this series. The first translation into English was done anonymously in 1706 from the Galland translation. For more details, see the Wikipedia entry for One Thousand and One Nights. For more information on the Galland translation and its importance, see the Wikipedia entry for Antoine Galland.
Since the Arabian Nights per se has no copyright, it has been published in many variations in many ways, and a complete list of all publications would be excessive, and almost surely incomplete. (The OCLC lists 5,436 entries for this title as of Oct. 2011; 2,753 in English. This includes editions by 92 authors, and doesn't include editions published as "The Thousand and One Nights", etc.). This title series attempts to organize those editions which attempt to be reasonably faithful to the "historic original", but does not include the many books that use the "Arabian Nights" as a starting point for original story-telling, such as books that go by titles such as "The New Arabian Nights".
We have attempted to include all of the well-documented 18th century editions, and the most important 19th century editions. In a few cases reprint edition dates may only be listed in the publication notes. 20th century editions are included when an editor chooses to add one, and no systematic effort has been taken to be comprehensive here. A good determination (and documentation) of important editions up to about 1880 can be found in an appendix to Sir Richard Burton's translation, p. 416, and we have used that as a source for some of the publications listed herein. (This appendix also includes substantial information about early non-English editions, which we have not yet attempted to include.)