Ibn Battutah – ethnographer, bigrapher, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist – was just twenty-one when he set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on a pilgramage to Mecca . . . He did not return to Morocco for another twenty-nine years, travelling instead through more than forty countries on the modern map, covering seventy-five thousand miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian and occasional botanist and gastronome.

With this edition by Mackintosh-Smith, Battutah's Travels takes its place alongside other indestructible masterpieces of the travel-writing genre.

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

Tim Mackintosh-Smith has lived in San'a - the Yemeni capital - for the last twenty years. His acclaimed Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah won him a Thomas Cook/ Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award.