A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby

A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby lands on the shelves of my shop.

HarperCollins, 1994, Hardback in dust wrapper.

From the cover: In 1967, Eric Newby and his wife Wanda fulfilled a long-cherished ambition when they acquired I Castagni (otherwise The Chestnuts), a small and excessively ruined farmhouse in the foothills of the Apuan Alps on the borders of Liguria and northern Tuscany. They were the first foreigners to live in the area, and twenty-five years later they remained the only ones.

The house came with a tileless roof, a long-abandoned septic tank and a lavatory hidden in a dense plantation of canes in the open air. It also contained a wealth of indigenous wildlife: a large colony of cockroaches; a hornets nest; an adder which shed its skin every year on a beam in the owners bedroom; predatory mice the size of small cats who used red flannel from Eric Newbys favourite shirts to line their offsprings nests; and, not least, a sitting tenant, Attilio a minute, eccentric and very ancient man who had once built an aeroplane in which he had launched himself from a high place and crashed, hurting himself badly.

In this affectionate, humorous, often hilarious book, Eric Newby recounts how he and Wanda, who met in Italy in 1943 after he escaped from a POW camp, pulled I Castagni from the brink of collapse with the aid of the local esperti (skilled workmen). It describes their long-enduring friendship with the neighbouring contadini, who welcomed them whether eating, drinking, harvesting grapes and olives, or hunting for fungus and wild asparagus from the moment they arrived.

In Love and War in the Apennines, Eric Newby described the start of his love affair with Italy; in A Small Place in Italy, with his inimitable wry humour and eye for the quirks and oddities of human nature, he chronicles how it grew to maturity.

Good+ in Good+ Dust Wrapper. A little rubbing to the edges of the dust wrapper. Leans. Top edge of the text block spotted. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 211 pages. 9½” x 6¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

A Teacup in a Storm: An Explorer’s Guide to Life by Mick Conefrey

A Teacup in a Storm: An Explorer’s Guide to Life by Mick Conefrey lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Collins, 2005, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Drawings;

From the cover: A witty, entertaining and utterly unique look at the great explorers and the life-lessons we can draw from them.

Exploration and explorers hold a constant fascination, with tales of heroism and the overcoming of great odds in the most inhospitable environments. With inspirational stories we can apply to our everyday life, as well as more bizarre and quirky lessons, such as how to escape an anaconda or find water in a desert, this is a uniquely entertaining and inspirational book.

Taking as its structure the stages of a typical expedition, from planning to setting out, finding your goal and surviving safely to get home, the book is packed with fascinating anecdotes about explorers such as Shackleton, Scott, Livingstone and Stanley. It teaches us instructive lessons about fund-raising, team-building, dealing with confrontations, whilst also considering less everyday problems, such as rationing underwear and facing down elephants. With its combination of the serious and the bizarre, the inspirational and the hilarious, A Teacup in a Storm is an engagingly irresistible proposition.

Very Good in Very Good Dust Wrapper. Gently bruised at the head of the spine and the top corners of the boards with commensurate wear to the dust wrapper. Text complete, clean and tight.

Red boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 240 pages. Index. 8″ x 5¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Beyond the Alps: A Summer in the Italian Hill Towns by Robert M. Coates

Beyond the Alps: A Summer in the Italian Hill Towns by Robert M. Coates lands on the shelves of my shop.

London: Victor Gollancz, 1962, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps;

From the cover: Robert M. Coates, the New Yorker art critic, is the kind of traveller who travels purely for pleasure. He is not rushing from gallery to gallery, from Rome to Florence, to see famous masterpieces, for fear of missing something. One mid-May morning he and his friends were among the first that season to cross over the Little St. Bernard pass into Italy by car, with the objective of visiting at leisure the small Italian towns between the Swiss frontier and Rome. Aosta in the Alps, Arezzo, Lucca, Assisi, Orvieto are some of their stopping places: and what a tour of delight it was for them!

Mr. Coates is the sort of writer-traveller who lives where he travels: he gets the same proportional delight out of a good al fresco meal in the sunshine as he does from Signorellis relatively little admired masterpieces at Cortona or the Resur-rection by Piero della Francesca at Sansepolcro. He is as interested in the prevalence of Levi jeans among the youth of some small town as in its historical associations. For him the sun always seems to be shining and, if by exception it does not, why there are restaurants and cafes to sit in and people to talk to! He loves, as much as any traveller, the odd piece of folklore and the anecdote picked up in the course of chance conversations.

This is a book that has a special appeal today, when so many tourists turn to Italy that the big and obvious goals are now peppered with visitors. With Mr. Coates book the reader is directed to places far less frequented but no less rewarding. How relatively few, for instance, have gloried in the soaring cathedral at Orvieto and the magnificent church of San Michele at Lucca, city of churches! Far fewer have seen the fantastic Park of Monsters at tiny Bomarzo, only forty miles from Rome a cascade of grotesque, half-ruined statues designed for the Orsini family in the 16th century. And even Bomarzo is better known than the numerous small villages Mr. Coates took such delight in.

Beyond the Alps is like stimulating conversation with a practised raconteur: stimulating in the strict sense, because the reader is likely to finish with an irresistible urge to explore these treasures some of them hidden treasures for himself.

Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with fraying to the spine ends. Price Clipped. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Previous owners’ inscription to the first blank. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Blue boards with Gilt titling to the Spine. 159 pages. 8¾” x 5½”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Across The Roof Of The World by Wilfred Skrede

Across The Roof Of The World by Wilfred Skrede lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1954, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps to the endpapers and blanks;

From the cover: A lone figure wandering in the vastness of Asia, Wilfred Skrede, a young Norwegian, saw many strange things which few from the West have ever seen.

He was no explorer accompanied by the equipment and porters of a great expedition, but a young man in wartime making his way as best he could to Little Norway in Canada across Russia and Turkestan, over the Himalayas, on to India and from there to Singapore and around the Cape of Good Hope.

Crippled and exhausted, but with mind alert, he journeyed along the tracks where once thundered the hordes of Ghenghis Khan and where centuries ago slowly moved the caravans on the route from far Cathay. In the Mintaka Pass, high in the Himalayas, his only signposts were the skeletons of men and innumerable horses that had perished along the way, their powdering bones vanishing in the winds of Time

Skrede was truly a man from another world treated often with hostility, indifference, even brutality and sometimes with unexpected kindness by people whose language he could not speak. Through every adventure and he had many his youthful resilience enabled him to laugh at himself, his sense of humour helped him to see hope where others might have seen none, but even he, with youth and hope on his side, was sometimes overwhelmed by unbearable loneliness. The miracle is that he ever survived to tell his story.

Good in Poor Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with several short tears and a little loss. Gently bruised at the head, tail and corners of the binding. Pages lightly age-tanned.

Green boards with Black titling to the Spine. 255 pages. 8″ x 5¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

The Red Snows: An Account of the British Caucasus Expedition, 1958 by Sir John Hunt & Christopher Brasher

The Red Snows: An Account of the British Caucasus Expedition, 1958 by Sir John Hunt & Christopher Brasher lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1960, Hardback in dust wrapper.

From the cover: Five years after they first made application, a party of British mountaineers was given permission to climb in Soviet territory. Among them were Sir John Hunt, leader of the successful Everest expedition, and Christopher Brasher, Olympic athlete turned mountaineer.

Now their story of their visit to the picturesquely, and literally, named red snows of the Caucasus will fascinate all their fellow-mountaineers and everyone else as well who is looking for an unfamiliar view of modern Russia.

Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded. Leans slightly. Edges of the text block lightly spotted.

Green boards with Black titling to the Spine. 176 pages. Index. 8½” x 5½”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Corsair Country: The Diary of a Journey Along the Barbary Coast by Xan Fielding

Corsair Country: The Diary of a Journey Along the Barbary Coast by Xan Fielding lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1959, Hardback in dust wrapper.

From the cover: Mr. Fielding started on his journey from Tangier to Tripoli determined to re-discover the harbours and towns of the Barbary Coast pirates, to find what was left of the descendants of those ruthless and inspired sailors who terrorized the maritime nations of Europe for three centuries. But as he travelled eastwards from Morocco to Algiers and Tunis and on to the beginnings of the Libyan desert he found himself turning over the stones of history more ancient than that of the Corsairs the history of Europes struggle with Africa, of the perennial Christian crusade against the monolithic intransigence of Islam.

Corsair Country is the chronicle of a modern travellers journey which became a voyage from which has sprung all that is distinctively Latin and Christian in our civilization.

Good+ in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn, faded and somewhat grubby overall. Gently bruised at the head of the spine and the top corners of the boards with commensurate wear to the dust wrapper. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Pale Blue boards with Black titling to the Spine. 232 pages. Index. 8″ x 5¼”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

The Jungle And The Damned by Hassoldt Davis

The Jungle And The Damned by Hassoldt Davis lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1954, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps [1];

From the cover: This is the true story of the Hassoldt Davis exploration of French Guiana, inland from St. Laurent to the Tumuc Humac mountains of the Brazilian border. He was accompanied by his wife, who combined the roles of honeymooner and expedition photographer. The first stop before the 300-mile trek along the Maroni River was Devils Island and the penal settlements of Cayenne. The reader cannot but be touched by the stories Mr. Davis has to tell of life among the condemned, where good and bad are mingled as in the world outside. The main part of the book is concerned with the Maroni River exploratory journey, and the author describes the fantastic plant and animal life of this region (some of it, in fact, still unexplored) and the hardly less fantastic tribes who inhabit it. There were, for instance, the bisexual Rouccuyennes, the unseen Oyaricoulets who stalked the boat and left their inviting white markers or threatening red ones to comfort or alarm the travellers.

This is a fascinating book, giving a unique picture of a little-known part of the world which still retains its menace and its mystery. The superb photographs taken by the Daviss share the honours with the engrossing story.

Good+ in Poor Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with an untidy triangular nick to the spine. Edges of the text block lightly spotted. Pages lightly age-tanned.

Blue boards with Black titling to the Spine. 255 pages. 8¾” x 5½”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

The Lost World Of The Amazon by Franz Eichhorn

The Lost World Of The Amazon by Franz Eichhorn lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1955, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps [1];

From the cover: THIS is the thrilling story of the making of one of the most brilliant documentary films Franz Eichhorns famous expedition into the Green Hell of the Amazon.

It is a story of skill, doggedness and tremendous endurance. After a first attempt during which one of their party died, the team managed to drag their heavy equipment through tangled forest and over a lacework of rivers and primeval swamps, fighting fever and intense heat, until their work was complete: an unforgettable record of nightmarish beasts and strange people.

Under enormous difficulties the expedition succeeded in taking the first underwater shots of the notorious cannibal fish, the piranha. In the River of a Thousand Crocodiles, they filmed the giant jacares; in the jungles of Altamira they found the last survivors of a white-skinned Indian race. A successful hunt for the zoological monster the butterfly with the crocodile head suddenly changed to high drama in a life-or-death struggle with a giant anaconda.

Franz Eichhorn is justly world-famous for his documentary work. His expedition deep into the Amazon resulted in cinema history, permanent and astounding proof of this mysterious, terrifying, lost world where time has truly stood still.

Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with a little fraying at the spine ends and corners. The pages are somewhat tanned, if tight, and a little musty.

Red boards with Black titling to the Spine. 188 pages. 8¾” x 5¾”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

The Heart Of Nepal by Duncan Forbes

The Heart Of Nepal by Duncan Forbes lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1962, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Maps [1];

From the cover: This book by a Major in the Royal Army Educational Corps, who has seen service in many lands of the East, is an attempt to express his fascination for a country which, during his residence there, captured his enthusiasm more than any other land he has visited. The contrasts between the fertile, thickly populated Valley of Nepal with its ancient civilization, only now being awakened to the possibilities and realities of modern life, and the simple, hardy existence in the mountains that surround it; between the mighty scale of the countryside, beside which the Alps look like mere hillocks, and the minute detail of the imagination of the people, as shown in their art and culture, all contributed to this fascination.

Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded. Gently bruised at the head, tail and corners of the binding. Text complete, clean and tight but a little age-tanned.

Blue boards with Black titling to the Spine. 192 pages. Index. 8¾” x 5¾”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!

Adventurer’s Paradise by Alastair Scobie

Adventurer’s Paradise by Alastair Scobie lands on the shelves of my shop.

The Travel Book Club, 1955, Hardback in dust wrapper.

Illustrated by way of: Black & White Photographs; Maps [1];

From the cover: Alastair Scobie spends his time in the wilder parts of East Africa looking for trouble principally wild-animal trouble. With a film camera and gun he wanders over the long plains and steep passes of Northern Kenya, ankle deep in volcanic dust, or through gorilla and rhino tunnels, forced passages in the massed bamboo forests of the Mountains of the Moon on the edge of the Congo. Wherever he goes he seeks sensation for the entertainment of the millions who take their thrills vicariously through the medium of cinema or television.

His book is packed with stories of his adventures and of the fantastic characters, white and black, in whose company he has found a wild and esoteric pleasure. Some of them may be crazy, some utterly degenerate, some plain savage, but the hilarious tales of their primitive lives, packed helter-skelter between the thrills of his more frightening moments in putting on film the dangers of the wild, make a book which cannot fail to keep any armchair-traveller awake into the small hours.

There have been many books of big-game hunting, but your big-game hunter does not go on safari asking for trouble ; he would much rather shoot his lion or rhino from a safe distance than wait for it to come full tilt at him face to face. For the free-lance movie cameraman the goal is just that. He can only sell action close-up action and if the camera doesnt get out from under quickly enough that merely means another camera and perhaps another cameraman. Alastair Scobie has so far managed to get out from under in the nick of time.

Very Good in Good Dust Wrapper. Unlaminated dust wrapper a little edgeworn and faded with light fraying to the spine ends and corners. Tanning to the blanks. Text complete, clean and tight otherwise.

Blue boards with Black titling to the Spine. 249 pages. Index. 8½” x 5½”.

Of course, if you don’t like this one there are plenty more available here!