Gen. The Services fortnightly Middle East Digest. by GENERAL HEADQUARTERS MIDDLE EAST

[Cairo, Société Orientale de Publicité, Kasr-el-Aini Printing Press, and Urwand and Sons], February 1, 1942 -January 16, 1943. 8vo. Original colour-printed wrappers, bound in 5 contemporary Middle Eastern green cloth-bound volumes with chipped and faded red sheepskin labels, marbled endpapers; highly illustrated with photographic plates (in pagination) and in the text; covers and a few plates a bit cropped by the binder, a few covers a little spotted, text evenly browned, due to paper stock, loss to small lower portion of the first leaf of issue 6, otherwise clean and good. The first 30 issues of one of the rarer wartime publications, a bi-monthly produced for the troops in the Middle East, distributed in Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Lybia and Iran. Full of witty original caricatures and illustrations, with contributions by Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley, William Hickey, Norman Hare, John Steinbeck, Leslie Charteris, John Pudney and others. The subtitle of the periodical varies from issue to issue; however, the slighly cryptic title is explained in the first issue, which depicts a Churchill Toby jug on the cover. 'Some say the word "gen" is an abbreviation of "intelligence," some, that it stands for "genuine information." R.A.F. artificers complicate matters by insisting that it derives from the title of their training text-book "General Engineering Notes." The only other sets we are able to trace in Britain are in the British Library (all 90 issues, published until July 28, 1945) and the Imperial War Museum (number of issues not indicated).