The outlook for the book biz in general… well… let’s say if it were weather, you’d want thermal underwear and a flashlight with extra batteries. (As a writer that doesn’t phase me in the least, in case you were wondering, for I live in my very own ever-sunlit and toasty-cavernous imaginal crystal igloo! Dear writerly reader, I can recommend it! Write on!) Nonetheless one bright spot just might sparkle: certain niches of the rare book business. It has occurred to me, rare book aficionada that I am, to go into this business, but whenever the urge strikes, I make a cup of camomile tea, do some Pranayama… and reread Greg Gibson’s “Don’t Do It.”
The best of the rare book purveyors are members of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA). Over the past few months I’ve been watching some interviews with these fine folks on the ABAA website. Herewith some of the especially interesting ones, starting with Larisa Cassell:
Nicholas Potter:
Peter Burnett:
John Reznikoff:
Priscilla Juvelis:
Penelope Daly:
P.S. Check out Greg Gibson’s Ten Pound Island Book Company blog here. (He’s a splendid writer, too. My favorite of his books is Demon of the Waters, one of the strangest true stories I have ever read.)
In this age of Instagram and Tripadvisor & etc. etc. etc. it would seem that increasingly fewer people have the interest, never mind the attentional focus, for literary travel memoir. But readers of this genre were always a tiny minority of the general population. I say, on this planet of billions of people, there will always be a good number of people who read, and read insatiably, seriously, broadly, and deeply. Ergo, we can be sure that someone somewhere will be writing something about someplace, and some number of these works, however small, will undoubtedly be read by some intelligent and thoughtful someone.
I write literary travel memoir and, on occasion, I teach a workshop on that genre, so when, as part of my reading for my book in-progress on Far West Texas, I came across cultural historian David M. Wrobel’s superb Global West, American Frontier, apart from its helping me get my mind around “Texas,” I felt moved to make a few notes on what he has to say about this oft-undervalued literary genre. Dear writerly reader, may you may find these quotes as heartening as I did.
“The travel book remained a key genre throughout the twentieth century, and still is today. In the early twenty-first century, when it is possible to fly to nearly anywhere in the world within a day and to travel virtually anywhere via the Internet, a quaint, old-fashioned printed companion remains surprisingly popular. A distinctive hybrid of the fiction and nonfiction forms, of reflection and reportage, of anthropology, history, and literature, still serves as an essential accompaniment for actual travel or provides core background reading for a journey.” (pp. 5-6)
“The truly gifted and valuable travel writers are, I would venture, the ones who come to realize that they are not just traveling through other landscapes but through the landscapes of other people’s lives; they are visitors who care to learn what a place means to the people who live there.” (p.13)
“[T]he travel narrative form has remained an important guide to western America even as new technological developments have compressed space and rendered the most faraway places more readily accessible. For this reason, the travel book can be deemed an unlikely survivor in the digital age.” (p.17)
“The travel book lives on, oblivious to the assumption that its time should long since have passed.” (p.187)
“The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners. This is why the travel book has persisted for nearly two centuries since its death was first announced and for more than three-quarters of a century since its demise was dramatically reproclaimed, and why today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge. The ease of travel does not restrict the vision of the obervant travel writer in the postmodern age any more than the difficulty of travel guaranteed smart observation in the premodern or modern periods.” (p.187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p.187)
-David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier
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PS I would consider these among the best of the genre:
See also the Q & A’s here on Madam Mayo blog with the brilliant Shelley Armitage (Walking the Llano); Bruce Berger (A Desert Harvest, etc.); and Sara Mansfield Taber (Bread of Three Rivers, etc).
