Although Robert Curzon is remembered today for the vivid, often humorous accounts of his journeys in the Middle East during the 1830s and early 1840s, he saw himself as a devoted collector and preserver of ancient books and manuscripts. His first travel book, A Visit to Monasteries in the Levant (1849), was reprinted several times in England and America during the nineteenth century and twice in the twentieth. Less well known but equally charming is Armenia: A Year at Erzeroom, and on the Frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia (1854), which described the year that Curzon had spent along the border of Turkey and Persia in 1842.

Most of Curzon's surviving correspondence and much of his published writing are devoted to his collecting of manuscripts, and had it not been for this fascination, he would have lacked any reason to visit the ancient monasteries of the Middle East that had changed...