Northwestern University Press

 

Marlboro Travel Series

   Winter is rapidly approaching, but travel restrictions and hassles are only slowly being lessened.  Reading is an option and picking up books is easier than getting through an airport. If you enjoy learning about travel to exotic places, this list will be of interest and perhaps even of use.  You can find out what it was like to travel to Ecuador in the 1920s or go from Italy to India in 1912.

    I have posted about university presses and book series and this one provides a combination of those two interests. The result is a list of fine travel accounts. The press is at Northwestern University and the series is 'Marlboro Travel'. It shows, once again, that publishing by universities can provide another outlet for good books.

   All of these books are available from Northwestern University Press and they are reasonably priced. Some of the older works are available for free over the internet. All of these books can also be found via booksellers like AbeBooks and Amazon. Of the seventeen books listed, fourteen (the ones bolded)  are found at the campus nearby - Western University. Check the catalogue, or with a librarian before heading to campus.

An Italian Journey

by Jean Giono

In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.

Baghdad Sketches

by Freya Stark

In the fall of 1928, thirty-five year-old Freya Stark set out on her first journey to the Middle East. She spent most of the next four years in Iraq and Persia, visiting ancient and medieval sites, and traveling alone through some of the wilder corners of the region.

By the Ionian Sea

by George Gissing

The second of two memorable trips to the Mediterranean. The second was to Calabria and the wild Italian coast south of Naples. From bad food to filthy inns and dangerously watered wine, to a strange malarial-type fever which kept him bedridden for days, Gissing suffered all for the sake of viewing the sites and old ruins of "Magna Graecia," and to see for himself the classical cities he called his "land of romance." Filled with humor, pathos, and captivating landscapes, By the Ionian Sea continues to inspire the traveler, while re-educating the reader in the glories of this still-forgotten corner of Italy.

Cities and Sea-Coasts and Islands

by Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons's collection of twenty-six essays on travel in Spain, life in London, and sojourns among islands and sea-coasts of France, England, and Ireland first appeared in the United States in 1919. His verbal portraits of the places he visited, whether bold and colorful or sensitive and merely suggestive, are as intriguing and interesting today as when he first wrote them.

Ecuador: A Travel Journal

by Henri Michaux

Poet Henri Michaux boarded a ship for Ecuador in 1927 as "a man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal." The result is a work of pointed observation and sensual, even hallucinogenic, poetry and prose.

Eothen

by Alexander William Kinglake

In the autumn of 1834, Alexander Kinglake and John Savile set out together for Turkey and the Levant. When Savile was summoned home Kinglake, accompanied only by his guide and interpreter, went on by ship to Cyprus and Beirut, then to the Holy Land, Cairo, and Damascus. On his own in a foreign world, Kinglake used the solitary travel for prolonged self-scrutiny, and ultimately for liberation.

Forbidden Journey

by Ella K. Maillart

Introduction by Dervla Murphy

In 1935 Ella Maillart contemplated one of the most arduous journeys in the world: the "impossible journey" from Peking, then a part of Japanese-occupied China, through the distant province of Sinkiang (present day Tukestan), to Kashmir. Traveling along with newswriter Peter Fleming and also her companion Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Maillart undertook a journey considered almost beyond imagination for any European and doubly so for a woman.

Hills and the Sea

by Hilaire Belloc

Hills and the Sea, first published in 1906 to critical acclaim, collects thirty-eight of Hilaire Belloc's essays, spanning several periods of time and travel. The New York Times noted, "[This] book abounds in sweetness and light, and one must be something more than human or something less not to find therein some congenial and sympathetic message--possibly many."

Italian Journeys

by W.D. Howells

Italian Journeys, published in 1867 and written during the four years Howells spent as an American consul in Venice, is more than a lively and entertaining book of travel. It is also a shrewd and perceptive inspection of persons and places European. On every page it interrogates European values while between every line it grapples with problems of American identity.

Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind

by Guido Gozzano

The distinguished Italian poet Guido Gozzano (1883-1916) embarked for India in February 1912, ostensibly to treat his tuberculosis. His trip lasted three months and, all told, he spent six weeks on the subcontinent. His dispatches home for a newspaper are collected and published here in English for the first time.

Mogreb-El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco

by R.B. Cunninghame Graham

Introduction by Edward Garnett

R. B. Cunninghame Graham's trek into the Moroccan interior is a classic of travel writing. Intending to reach the forbidden city of Tarudant, he was instead captured and held prisoner for four months in a medieval castle, where he observed in detail the panorama of Berber life. Part history, part social commentary as only the British wrote it, this account makes fascinating reading nearly a century later.

Old Calabria

by Norman Douglas

First published in 1915, Old Calabria is a comprehensive and exciting account of adventure travel. Captivated by the pagan quality of the mezzogiorno, Norman Douglas plunged into Calabria, the southernmost and most backward part of Italy (a province that was still largely devoid of any form of modern amenity). He endured extremes of climate, scaled mountains, rode in carriages driven by villainous coachmen, and traversed remote stretches of country where murderous groups of banditti were known to roam. As Jon Manchip White points out in his introduction, it "makes good reading, but it must have constituted a protracted and frightening ordeal--frightening, that is, to anyone except someone like Douglas, possessed of a more than normal share of guts and fortitude."

The Sea and the Jungle

by H. M. Tomlinson

Considered a masterpiece of travel literature for nearly a century, The Sea and the Jungle is a wise and witty book of firsts: ostensibly a lighthearted story of a Londoner's first ocean voyage, it is also a carefully crafted journalistic account of the first successful ascent of the Amazon River and its tributary, the Madeira, by an English steamer. First published in 1912, The Sea and the Jungle remains one of the most popular accounts of a traveler's experience in Amazonia. As Peter Matthiessen observed fifty years later, " The Sea and the Jungle is one of the few level-headed works in the literature of this region. . . . accurate and difficult to improve upon."

The Spirit of Mediterranean Places

by Michael Butor

This book gathers French writer Michel Butor's essays on his travel in the Mediterranean. Included are pieces on Cordova, Istanbul, Salonica, Delphi, Crete, and northern Italy, as well as an extended essay on Egypt--where, when he was 24, Butor spent a year teaching French in a secondary school. Michel Butor is one of the leading exponents of the avant-garde writing that emerged in France in the 1950s .

Travels Through France and Italy

by Tobias Smollett

Introduction by Osbert Sitwell

"Traduced by malice, persecuted by fiction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity," Tobias Smollett set off on a journey through France and Italy to relieve his despair. While there, he wrote regularly to his friends, and the result is this fascinating, wholeheartedly personal account of places he encountered.

Travels through France and Italy is a landmark work in travel literature. Full of prejudice, grousing, sharp observation, and caustic satire, it is the first travel book in modern literature to go beyond the simple conveyance of information to reflect the writer's state of mind.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

by Robert Louis Stevenson

In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson set out on a walking tour of the Cévennes behind Modestine, the donkey that carried his baggage. The one hundred twenty-mile trip was through difficult country and Modestine proved to be less than agreeable, too. Although Stevenson's adventure lasted only twelve days, his account suggests a much longer journey, with all sorts of backward glances, detours, and retracing of steps, both on the terrain and in spirit.

Venetian Life

by W.D. Howells

In 1869 W. D. Howells, in reward for having written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, was given the job of consul in Venice.For a young nineteenth-century American who had left  school when he was nine to earn a living, the hardest part of his sinecure was that he had almost nothing to do. "I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving a salary for no service performed," he wrote. "I reminded myself that, soon or late, I must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better be sooner than later."

Venetian Life flows from the enchantment, the magical improbability, of the years Howell spent in that magnificent city dining with the rich, mingling with the humble, and reporting it all with a uniquely American wit and curiosity.

Sources:
  For other university presses mentioned on this blog see, for example: the list of Environmental Books from the University of Washington and the regional publications from Wayne State and Penn State. 

  The book descriptions above are all from the Northwestern University Press website. In the interest of full disclosure, I have not yet read any of them. Perhaps I will start with Maillart's Forbidden Journey, since I recall reading about that trip from Peter Fleming, who deserves a post of his very own.