NOTES OF A USED AND OUT-OF-PRINT BOOK DEALER

Issue 19. January 22, 2002

Published by Continental Books for its customers and interested others. This time out we emphasize travel and adventure. Our conclusion: Take a book with you when you go out, write one when you get back.

1. Finding unity in the book.
2. Notes on travel notes
3. Here comes Hunza again.

SEPARATE BUT TOGETHER

1
Elmer Conshohocken, the composite book dealer, attended a social evening, really a party in its conviviality and density. A quiet party though without any major scandal except the couple who locked themselves in the bedroom and boorishly remained barricaded within and prevented others from retrieving their coats. Elmer found himself in a tete-a-tete with two others, really a tete-a-tete-a-tete, talking about Ethiopia.

The others: the beautiful hostess, a woman of determination and courage whose essential femininity was unaffected by her knowledge and experience, who had sojourned in Ethiopia as a radical social worker for a number of months and had traveled the rail link between Addis Ababa and Djibouti; and a distinguished Ethiopian scholar visiting the United States for advanced education in the physical sciences, a man of intelligence and sensibility, a follower of Haile Selassie. All Elmer had of the Horn of Africa experience was the leftover recollections of an avid armchair reader.

The conversation was stilted and contentious at first dealing with the pros and cons of the overthrow of Selassie and the military takeover; the flirting with communism; the wars with breakaway Eritrea. Eventually it turned toward Elmer and they began to talk about books. The hostess left the room for a minute to visit her library cache and returned with Alan Moorehead's "The Blue Nile."

"Ah," the three said together. They had all read it and loved it. And in this moment of exposed sharing they achieved a unity, even though transient and ephemeral. They joined in a oneness that had eluded them before and they became quiet and pensive.

2
Another use for a book: The establishment and recognition of community. A password that can suddenly reveal a shared, even though sometimes secret, identity.

GOING OUT? EXPECT TO FIND SOMEONE COMING BACK

1
The basic travel book, and some might claim the basic book over all topics, is the guide, the how to do it, the technical advisor. With this in hand even the most shy, innocent and inexperienced can embark on a journey, no matter how far or demanding, with confidence. These guides are straightforward, direct, no-nonsense constructions, piling details into high mountains of data. The face of the author of the guide though, if there is only one author, is not evident, it is hidden. Timetables, exchange rates, beds and breakfasts, cathedrals, naughty bars and so on but nothing about who is talking.

Sometimes they mislead or are out-of-date but no matter, read enough of them and within a few hours of arriving in a strange town your basic requirements of sleep, eat and be merry are in place. You are oriented. The threat of the disconnect, the unhinging, the loss of the understanding other, the escalating discomfort is under control.

2
Up from the guides is the vast class of travel narratives where the traveler, now returned and transformed into the writer, describes his trip in detail. Whether hedonistic, heroic, comic, or of a bland sameness these take the form of the adventure. What's next is always problematic. The reader, who later in his own travels tracks through the same space, finds it mythologized, filled with the sprites of the predecessor's actions and observations. The place glows with meanings. One's own adventures form against the tapestry left by the other. These narratives are suffused with the persona of the writer, so you not only learn about the worlds he has seen but about him as well. He can become a friend and the accession of each of his subsequent books expands your knowledge of him.

Isn't that what is marvelous about the travel books of Henry Miller like "The Colossus of Marousi" and "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare"? Don't we love him for his exaggerated egoism? The personality dominating the place.

3
Chiang Yee, the Silent Traveller, in his travel books offers us a step beyond personality. He adds the informed sensibility of another civilization for he is steeped in the Chinese mandarin traditions. It is through his, to us, alien eyes that we see our familiar spaces as we approximate the peripatetic experience of a true stranger. Beside the narrative Yee supplies a large number of his own sketches, drawings and paintings of the places he visits. As he walks and talks, he points. A pleasant companion.

In a preface Van Wick Brooks tells us that silent traveller means "dumb walking man" in Chinese and that this suggests a "roaming Buddhist monk."

Yee left China in 1933, a civil servant forced into exile after a disagreement with a warlord. He taught and lectured and exhibited his paintings and calligraphy and wrote his books over four decades, finally returning to China for a visit in 1975. As the Silent Traveller he visited and reported on Lakeland (The Lake District in Britain), London, Yorkshire Dales, Oxford, Edinburgh, New York, Dublin, Paris, Boston, San Francisco, Japan, and, finally, China.
Chiang Yee (1903-1977)

4
Travel adventure always involves discomfort. At its far edge it offers physical danger as well. A technique used by hell-bent adventurers is to establish a unique rule of engagement that is as sure of attracting unhappy attention as the matador's cape. The writer at center stage, action impending, the reader claims a front row seat. Bring on the tigers.

Two books by Eric Hansen come to mind: STRANGER IN THE FOREST, On Foot Across Borneo: and MOTORING WITH MOHAMMED, Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea. Hansen spent a number of years in Southeast Asia and these are reports extracted from the whole experience.

In Borneo he parades as an itinerant merchant of shotgun shells (a local necessity) and he leaves the civilized northern coast and penetrates the interior via river-boat and then on foot. Into the heart of darkness, like Joseph Conrad, finding a life among the local tribal people. Until very recently these were headhunters. Eventually they mistakenly identify Hansen with malignant spirits, and force him to flee for his life. Meanwhile the narrative carries information on the culture and material life of Borneo to us like bits of flotsam. We hardly know we are being educated.

The Yemen story has two parts dealing with the two sides of treasure, its loss and its recovery. One can't help but think of Robert Louis Stevenson. The author finally exiting Southeast Asia sails in a small boat with two couples as passengers into the Red Sea. Their boat founders and they are marooned on a deserted island off the Yemen coast. Their rescuers are so threatening that Hansen decides to bury the accumulated notes of his years abroad. This is the lost treasure. In the recovery phase he has to negotiate the labyrinth of Yemen's secretive and suspicious bureaucracy. Again, Yemen is revealed to us in the subtext.

Going to Borneo or Yemen? Pack Hansen.

THERE IS NO GLACIAL MILK AT THE SUPERETTE

In our last issue we discovered the fabulous world of the Hunza in the high mountains of Northwestern Pakistan by following a couple named Shor who were following the trail of Marco Polo. Hunza is the claimed model for Shangri-La in James Hilton's novel, "Lost Horizon."

Now we are discovering that Hunza, acclaimed as Shambhala, the Buddhist paradise, is the center of a flourishing, seemingly world-wide, cottage industry that includes tourist trips, yoga lessons, and designer foods, with special emphasis on diet bread.

There are some web sites offering the secret recipe for Hunza Bread for from $7.00 to $20. Don't go for it. You can get the various recipes free at the following sites:
http://www.breadrecipe.com/AZ/HunzaBread.asp
http://www.utopiasprings.com/chapatti.htm
http://ths.gardenweb.com/forums/load/specex/msg1021142021007.html

But before you get too immersed in kneading and baking visit a man named Phil Kaplan for a critique of the entire Hunza phenomenon http://www.philkaplan.com/thefitnesstruth/update_11_3_01.htm

Our thanks to jcorner for calling our attention.

THE HARD SELL

But watch out. In his turn Phil wants to sell you his book. And don't forget I also want to sell you a book. Running low on reading material? Visit us at http://www.continentalbooks.com and search through our stock. Find a lot of interesting anthropology and travel materials and novels at reasonable prices.

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Goodbye for now.

Copyright Alvin Katz 2002.