In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, books of travel and exploration were much more than simply the printed experiences of intrepid authors. They were works of both artistry and industry - products of the complex, and often contested, relationships between authors and editors, publishers and printers. These books captivated the reading public and played a vital role in creating new geographical truths. In that age of global wonder and of expanding empires, there was no publisher more renowned for its travel books than the House of John Murray. Drawing on detailed examination of the John Murray Archive of manuscripts, images, and the firm's correspondence with its many authors - a list that included such illustrious explorers and scientists as Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, and literary giants like Jane Austen, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott - Travels into Print considers how journeys of exploration became published accounts and how travelers sought to demonstrate the faithfulness of their written testimony and to secure their personal credibility. This fascinating study in historical geography and book history takes modern readers on a journey into the nature of exploration, the production of authority in published travel narratives, and the creation of geographical authorship - a journey bound together by the unifying force of a world-leading publisher.

Ellen Semple's "Influences of Geographic Environment" (1911) -- a treatise on what would later be called environmental determinism -- coincided with the emergence of geography as an independent academic discipline in North America and Britain. Highly controversial and written by one of America's first female professional geographers, it was considered by some a monument to Semple's scholarship and erudition, while for others it was conceptually flawed. And yet its influence on the development and direction of the new discipline of geography was profound. Innes Keighren explains why" Influences..." was encountered differently by different people, at different times and in different places, and reveals why the book aroused the passions it did. The result is a pioneering work that provides a wholesale re-visioning of the way in which geographical knowledge is disseminated.