One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of tales told by Scheherazade to the king. He will execute her when a tale ends, but the way she tells them, the tales contain tales within tales within tales…

The history of Nights is a complex one. I went over to Wikipedia to sort it out and learned that the whole thing seems to have started as Indian folklore, migrating to Persia and finding its first recognizable form as The Thousand Nights in the early 8th Century. The first European version was published in France in the early 1700s. The first English translation from the Arabic was in 1840, but was toned down quite a bit from the rather earthy original. The first unexpurgated English version came out about 40 years later.

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings has put together an article on the art of Nights, based on the book Visions of the Jinn by Robert Irwin. There is some gorgeous art here. Of course, the artists doing the illustrating are very much of their time. The first one to give it a shot had little or no idea about life in the Middle East, and as Popova says, “he portrayed the characters in European dress, on European furniture, amidst European architecture.” Thus it begins, and what follows shows as much how the story is adapted to the art as the art is adapted to the story. John Tenniel had a shot at it. There’s some gorgeous Art Deco material. And some modern color masterpieces.

This is a great art show that will whet your appetite for the whole book. Take a look at Visions of the Jinn: A Visual History of Arabian Nights.