'Eighty Days' tells the remarkable and little-known story of two American women who in 1889 were sent around the world in a contest to outpace not only Jules Verne's fictional 80-day voyage - but each other.

A fascinating picture of the American frontier emerges from Twain's fictionalized recollections of his experiences prospecting for gold, speculating in timber, and writing for a succession of small Western newspapers during the 1860s.

A sparkling new translation of one of the greatest travel books ever written: Marco Polo's seminal account of his journeys in the east. Marco Polo was the most famous traveller of his time. His voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China, after which he served the Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions. On his return to the West he was made a prisoner of war and met Rustichello of Pisa, with whom he collaborated on this book. His account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar religions, customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation and wild beasts of faraway lands. Evoking a remote and long-vanished world with colour and immediacy, Marco's book revolutionized western ideas about the then unknown East and is still one of the greatest travel accounts of all time. For this edition - the first completely new English translation of the Travels in over fifty years - Nigel Cliff has gone back to the original manuscript sources to produce a fresh, authoritative new version. The volume also contains invaluable editorial materials, including an introduction describing the world as it stood on the eve of Polo's departure, and examining the fantastical notions the West had developed of the East.

Full of humor, profundity, and obsession, these are tales of writers on peregrine paths. Some set out in search of legends or artistic inspiration; others seek spiritual epiphany or fulfillment of a promise. Their journeys lead them variously to Dracula's castle, Laura Ingalls Wilder's prairie, the Grimms' fairy-tale road, Mayan temples, Nathaniel West's California, the Camino de Santiago trail, Scott's Antarctica, the Marquis de Sade's haunted manor, or the sacred city of Varanasi. All of these pilgrimages are worthy journeys-redemptive and serious. But a time-honored element of pilgrimage is a suspension of rules, and there is absurdity and exuberance here as well.

Lose yourself in the thrilling political intrigue and tangled love affairs of wartime Egypt: Durrell's epic modern classic, introduced by Alaa Al Aswany (bestselling author of The Yacoubian Building). Every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position ... As the threat of world war looms over the city of Alexandria, an exiled Anglo-Irish schoolteacher unravels his erotic obsession with two women: Melissa, a fragile dancer, and Justine, a glamorous married Egyptian woman. Through conversations with Balthazar, a doctor and mystic, these intricate love affairs are cast in an ominous, sinister new light, as his private fixations become entangled with a mysterious murder plot ... One of the twentieth century's greatest masterpieces, rich in political and sexual intrigue, Lawrence Durrell's 'investigation of modern love' in the Alexandria Quartet set the world alight. Published in 1958, a year after the sensational Justine, the kaleidoscopic Balthazar burns just as brightly today. 'Legendary ... Casts a spell ... A fine storyteller. Reader, watch out!' Jan Morris, Guardian 'A brave and brazen work ... Lush and grandiose.' Independent 'One of the very best novelists of our time ... [such] beauty.' New York Times Book Review VOLUME TWO OF LAWRENCE DURRELL'S ALEXANDRIA QUARTET

"As my sense of the turpitude and guilt of sin was weakened, the vices of the natives appeared less odious and criminal. After a time, I was induced to yield to their allurements, to imitate their manners, and to join them in their sins . . . and it was not long ere I disencumbered myself of my European garment, and contented myself with the native dress. . . ."--from "Narrative of the late George Vason, of Nottingham"
As George Vason's anguished narrative shows, European encounters with Pacific peoples often proved as wrenching to the Europeans as to the natives. This anthology gathers some of the most vivid accounts of these cultural exchanges for the first time, placing the works of well-known figures such as Captain James Cook and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside the writings of lesser-known explorers, missionaries, beachcombers, and literary travelers who roamed the South Seas from the late seventeenth through the late nineteenth centuries.
Here we discover the stories of the British buccaneers and privateers who were lured to the Pacific by stories of fabulous wealth; of the scientists, cartographers, and natural historians who tried to fit the missing bits of terra incognita into a universal scheme of knowledge; and of the varied settlers who established a permanent European presence in Polynesia and Australia. Through their detailed commentary on each piece and their choice of selections, the editors--all respected scholars of the literature and cultures of the Pacific--emphasize the mutuality of impact of these colonial encounters and the continuity of Pacific cultures that still have the power to transform visitors today.

The late Samuel Eliot Morison was one of the most eminent American historians of the 20th century. The Great Explorers, an abridgement of his two-volume magnum opus, The European Discovery of America, vividly describes the early voyages that led to the discovery of the New World. Based on Morison's own trips, by plane, to the places the early discoverers landed, and on massive research into their maps, travelogues, and means of navigation, it tells, as no other book does, what the experience of these early explorers was. Morison describes their fear of sailing uncharted waters, their encounters with natives, their joy-and surprise-at discovering new land, and enriches his story with the photographs and maps he made while retracing the great voyages.

Travel was a way of life for the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke, and it was integral to his work. Between 1897 and 1920 he visited Venice ten times. The city has inspired countless writers and artists, but Rilke was both enthralled and provoked by it, as eager to see and explore the city's deserted shipyards and back alleys as the iconic sights of St Mark's and the Doge's Palace. He would walk the city alone, staying in simple guesthouses or the grand palaces of his patrons. Birgit Haustedt guides readers through the city in the poet's footsteps, showing us the sights through Rilke's eyes.

"A whimsical cross between a fairy tale and a travelogue. . . This version includes beautiful illustrated collages by the Italian artist Livia Signorini." -"T, The New York Times Style Magazine"
"It is no wonder that Signorini was moved to assemble collages that embrace the span of time that clearly resonated with Dickens as he explored Italy. Images from antiquarian books cozy up to Photoshop embellishments like enlarged rigatoni, made even more impressive by the gatefold pages across which these compositions spread, complementing Dickens's running theme of the moment being everything and nothing, honoring the poignancy of stone, water, light, and shadow." - "Imprint," "Print" Magazine
"Pictures from Italy," one of Charles Dickens' earlier works, is a whimsical foray into the twin worlds of travel and the imagination. Italian artist Livia Signorini plays with Dickens' sense of place, memory, and politics. The result is a brilliant contemporary dialogue with his work that renews our sense of his enduring vision. An extraordinary work that is as much about travel writing as it is about Dickens' journey to Italy itself, this handsome volume features 11 full-color gate folds.
US Grade Level Equivalent: 7-8+
US Guided Reading Level: Z
Lexile(R) Measure: 1200L

The eighteenth century witnessed the publication of an unprecedented number of voyages and travels, genuine and fictional. Within a genre distinguished by its diversity, curiosity, and experimental impulses, Katrina O'Loughlin investigates not just how women in the eighteenth century experienced travel, but also how travel writing facilitated their participation in literary and political culture. She canvases a range of accounts by intrepid women, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Craven's Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, Eliza Justice's A Voyage to Russia, and Anna Maria Falconbridge's Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone. Moving from Ottoman courts to theatres of war, O'Loughlin shows how gender frames access to people and spaces outside Enlightenment and Romantic Britain, and how travel provides women with a powerful cultural form for re-imagining their place in the world.

For nearly forty years John Wilson travelled the length and breadth of Scotland as a school inspector. From orkney to campbeltown and Jura to Dundee, he visited hundreds of schools and met thousands of teachers and pupils. In these memoirs, first published in 1928, he paints an insightful yet humorous picture of life in the country's schools after the 1872 education Act, which brought free schooling for all Scottish children between the ages of five and ten.

Focusing upon three previously unpublished accounts of youthful English travellers in Western Europe (in contrast to the renowned but maturely retrospective memoirs of other seventeenth-century figures such as John Evelyn), this study reassesses the early origins of the cultural phenomenon known as the 'Grand Tour'. Usually denoted primarily as a post-Restoration and eighteenth-century activity, the basis of the long term English fascination with the 'Grand Tour' was firmly rooted in the mid-Tudor and early-Stuart periods. Such travels were usually prompted by one of three reasons: the practical needs of diplomacy, the aesthetic allure of cultural tourism, and the expediencies of political or religious exile. The outbreak of the English Civil War during the late-1640s acted as a powerful stimulus to this kind of travel for male members of both royalist and parliamentarian families, as a means of distancing them from the social upheavals back home as well as broadening their intellectual horizons. The extensive editorial introductions to this publication of the experiences of three young Englishmen also consider how their travel records have survived in a variety of literary forms, including personal diaries (Montagu), family letters (Hammond) and formal prose records (Maynard's travels were written up by his servant, Robert Moody), and how these texts should now be interpreted not in isolation but alongside the diverse collections of prints, engravings, curiosities, coins and antiquities assembled by such travellers.

Sailing six thousand miles in eighty days, Allcard makes the classic southern route trade-wind crossing westward, and not without incident-severe gales, thief-catching in Spain, avoiding a seductive blonde in Gibraltar, encountering sharks and shoals of flying fish, and narrowly escaping falling overboard to his death when knocked out by gear falling from aloft. Allcard's plan to dodge the worst of the hurricane season on his return voyage is not accommodated by the elements. Through gales and headwinds, and one terrible storm, he takes seventy-four days to reach the Azores from New York, arriving minus his mizzen mast, desperately exhausted, injured, and hungry. The next leg, to Casablanca, is enlivened by a female stowaway, before he makes a safe return to England. Whether describing the pleasures or the trials, the phosphorescent nights or the storms, the operation of his ship or his own introspections, Edward Allcard eloquently conveys his deep appreciation of the sea, and the escape from modern civilisation it offers him.

At the age of 18, Beryl Markham, then Clutterbuck, was the first woman in Africa to be granted a racehorse trainer's licence she was still active as a trainer until her death in 1986. She took up flying in 1931, inventing big game hunting by air, and in September 1936 she made world headlines by becoming the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. This, her only book, was first published in 1942, and reveals her life as an innovator and adventurer.

In the summer of 1844, taking a break from novel-writing, the thirty-two-year-old Charles Dickens embarked on a journey to Italy with his wife, his five children and his young sister-in-law. Struck by the scenery and the rapid diorama of monuments and novelties around him, the celebrated author of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol captured his experiences and impressions in vivid detail. The result is a travelogue like no other, written by one of the finest writers of all time. Abounding in colour and humour, and interspersed with unforgettable set pieces, such as an eyewitness account of the beheading of a robber in Rome and a hilarious description of a tour guide's ruinous tumble down the slope of Mount Vesuvius, Pictures from Italy is further proof of Charles Dickens's genius and versatility.

Elderly British men display a variety of annoying habits. They write letters to the newspapers; they drink too much; they reminisce about the old days; they make lewd comments to younger women; they shout at the television screen; and they go for long walks and get lost. Jeremy Cameron chose the last of these options. Trying to emulate Patrick Leigh Fermor's feat of 1933, he walked from Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Leigh Fermor was a legendary figure. Scholar, multilinguist, beautiful prose stylist, war hero, tough guy, charmer and famous lover: Cameron is none of these things and he also suffers from a heart condition. Rest assured that there will be no tedious details of operations or stoicism in this book. Nor will there be descriptions of understated generosity, quiet irony or British phlegm. The main point of travel is to recognise the virtues of staying at home. When at home, it is not possible to get bogged down in Alpine snow, fall over on one's face on Kosovan tarmac or suffer a comprehensive mugging on deserted roads in Greece. Nor does one have to speak foreign languages, eat foreign food or, above all, drink terrible tea. It is about two thousand miles from Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Thirteen countries lie in wait for the walker. They have many wonderful sights and much fascinating history. Readers will not find them in this book. They will, however, find a number of stories of varying authenticity and some very dubious observations about life. By the time Turkey arrived, Cameron was utterly and completely fed up with the whole process. Never again would he do anything quite so stupid. He is currently walking round all the places in England beginning with the letter Q.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, accounts of the journey down the Nile became increasingly common. This narrative by William John Loftie (1839-1911), who wrote prolifically on travel, art, architecture and history, was published in 1879. (His A Century of Bibles is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.) Loftie spent in total about 15 months in the Nile valley over several seasons, and justifies his book by the rate of archaeological discoveries: 'books published even three years ago are already behind the times'. He gives details of his journeys to and from Egypt, and of visits to the famous sites, but, unusually, he takes notice of the current political and economic state of Egypt, and is trenchant in some of his criticisms. He also goes off the beaten tourist track, hiring donkeys to make excursions away from the river, rather than travelling only by boat.

In 1894, Martin Conway became the first man to walk the Alps 'from end to end' when he completed a 1,000-mile journey from the Col de Tende in Italy to the summit of the Ankogel in Austria. On a midsummer's morning, nearly 120 years later, Simon Thompson followed in his footsteps, setting out to explore both the mountains and the man. A charming rogue who led a 'fantastically eventful' life, according to The Times, Conway was a climber and pioneering explorer of the Himalaya, Spitsbergen, the Andes and Patagonia; a serial pursuer of American heiresses; an historian, collector and Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge; a company director and stock market promoter of dubious gold mines and non-existent rubber forests; the founder of the Imperial War Museum; the first foreigner to see the Russian crown jewels after the revolution; a successful journalist and author of over thirty books; a liberal politician; and a conservative MP. Shortly before he died, he was created 1st Baron Conway of Allington. Conway was a clubbable man who counted Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, J. P. Morgan, John Ruskin, Mark Twain and Edward Whymper among his many friends and acquaintances. An imperialist, a dreamer, a liar and a cheat, Conway 'walked in sunshine all his life', according to contemporaries, but he was also a restless, discontented man, constantly searching for meaning and purpose in his life. And that search that led him back, time and time again, to the Alps. In A Long Walk with Lord Conway, Simon Thompson retraces Conway's long journey over the peaks, passes and glaciers of the Alps and rediscovers the life of a complex and remarkable English adventurer.

'German military figures had a certain terrifying glamour,' wrote Patrick Leigh Fermor, recalling views about Germany during the First World War. When, he asked, had the bristling general replaced the 'philosophers and composers and bandsmen and peasants and students drinking and singing in harmony?' The enchanted forest, symbol of Romantic idealism and traditional folktales, had given way to other images of Germany and Germans. By following Leigh Fermor, and over eighty other British and North American literary visitors to Germany, this original anthology shows how different generations of English-speakers have depicted this country. Starting in the sixteenth century with some of the earliest travel accounts in English, Brian Melican presents a wide range of writing about, or set in, Germany. Letters from Johnsonians such as Boswell and Garrick and the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth; the journals of Herman Melville and Henry James; ante bellum fiction by authors such as D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford: all of this and more reveals an oft-forgotten richness in encounters with Germany before the horrors of the twentieth century. Work by Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender and wartime reporters through the 1940s exposes the country's darkest moments, while sometimes surprising takes on the conflict emerge from authors inside Germany with unique perspectives such as Christabel Bielenberg and Michael Howard. Post-war writing ranges from the spy fiction of Len Deighton to the writers who dissected post-Nazi Germany. The diversity of writing about Germany today encompasses light-hearted accounts and more searching passages taken from an eclectic selection of authors. Recorded and imagined images of Germany have changed dramatically across the centuries. Yet views on many of its features especially its cities and rivers, customs and cuisine have often remained constant. This anthology, with extensive introductions and annotations, offers a range of opinions, both typical and atypical of their time, and invites readers to venture beyond the usual discussion about this country at the very heart of Europe.

Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman's seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the "colossus" of Miller's book, stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis with his own loud crowing; cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village's single stove, and they stay in hotels that "have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past."

Elizabeth Smith Shortt was one of the first three women to obtain a medical degree in Canada, and her husband, Adam Shortt, enjoyed a successful career as a professor of politics and economics at Queen's University in Kingston. In 1908 Adam Shortt relocated his family to Ottawa to take up a commission to oversee civil service reform under Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier. There he convinced his superiors that an onsite investigation of four European countries would expedite his effort to improve Canada's bureaucracy, and in June 1911 he and Elizabeth embarked on their trip. This book chronicles their Atlantic crossing and extended visit to England, as well as trips to Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. The Shortts were generally pleased with England and its values, but Elizabeth was sharply critical of the behaviour of British nurses. Her diaries and letters, here reprinted, critiqued the lands and peoples she visited in Europe. Leading foreign feminists such as Lady Chichester and Mrs. Maud of the Mothers' Union in England sought her advice, as did Alice Salomon in Germany, the corresponding secretary of the International Council of Women. The diaries and letters presented in this volume reveal the multifaceted nature of Adam and Elizabeth Shortt, from public figures to difficult employers to a couple who couldn't help but live beyond their means. Peter E. Paul Dembski's introduction paints a picture of a couple who lived as moderate liberals with occasional conservative or radical views, and who blended science and an adherence to Protestant Christianity into their thinking. Their travel experiences, during a period of building political upheaval, provide a valuable snapshot of preaFirst World War European society and culture.

Following his election to Parliament, George Nathaniel Curzon (1859-1925) embarked on extensive travels and research in Asia, spending several months in Persia in 1889-90. Later viceroy of India, Curzon believed that growing Russian influence in Asia threatened Britain's interests, and that Persia was an important buffer state. Highly regarded upon publication in 1892, this illustrated two-volume work is a mix of history, geography, travel narrative, and social and political analysis. Intended to educate readers at home as to Persia's strategic significance, the work reflects its author's staunch support for British imperialism. Volume 1 describes Curzon's journey to Tehran, offering observations on the situation in the provinces which bordered Russian-controlled territory. Curzon then gives an overview of Persian institutions, including the monarchy, government, and the army. His Problems of the Far East (1894) is also reissued in this series.

Originally published in 1919, this book contains extracts from diaries kept by Arthur Everett Shipley, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, on a trip to the United States from September to December of 1918 as part of the British University Mission. The text is written in a vivid and readable style, preserving Shipley's recollections of touring America immediately before and after the end of World War One. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Anglo-American relations.