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Archive for the ‘travel’ Category

Video review of Posters of the Canadian Pacific

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

This video review showcases some beautiful, beautiful posters. I found Posters of the Canadian Pacific by Marc H. Choko & David L. Jones to be hard to put down.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company was hailed as one of the wonders of modern travel. The Canadian Pacific railroad spanned North America from the Atlantic to Pacific. The company also operated luxury hotels, passenger ocean liners, cargo ships, and an airline. To promote the company and also Canada as a destination, the Canadian Pacific produced more than 2,500 lithographic and silkscreen posters – 1,000 of which were created in its own design studio.

Posters of the Canadian Pacific showcases 300 of the best posters from this company. These posters were displayed in Canadian Pacific offices and travel agencies worldwide from the 1880s until the 1970s. They enticed millions to visit and perhaps even settle in Canada. The imagery is often about travel and leisure and the great outdoors – skiing, golf, hunting and beach life. There is a stunning array of Art Deco style work of the 1920s and ’30s.

Posted in AbeBooks, art, Canada, design, review, travel | No Comments »

Video review of illustrated edition of Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau & Scot Miller

Monday, October 24th, 2011

Cape Cod by Henry David Thoreau is one of the great travel books. Published in 1865, Thoreau describes the natural environment and people of ‘the bare and bended arm of Massachusetts’ during three short visits to Cape Cod spread over six years. A first edition will cost over $1200 but a great alternative is the illustrated edition of Cape Cod featuring photography by Scot Miller. Published in 2008, this book combines Thoreau’s original text with Miller’s beautiful photos. The images are often startlingly blue and reinforces Thoreau’s opinion that Cape Cod is all about the ocean.

Posted in AbeBooks, author, photography, review, travel | No Comments »

Judging the chair of the Booker judges

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

The Russians find it very funny that the head of the Man Booker judging committee is Britain’s former spy chief, according to this article in Prospect Magazine.

I make a fatal mistake: I begin to explain that the chair of the judges is Dame Stella Rimington and that she is an ex-head of the security services in Britain. And—bam!—that’s it: now everyone is laughing. Oh, the west, they guffaw. Oh, England, they chortle. Oh, hypocrisy. Oh, MI5. Oh, MI6. Even the FSB would not dare! You mean, they splutter, that the winner of your most famous literary prize is judged by the security services? It seems I could not have told them a more perfect Anglo-Russian joke if I tried.

Posted in awards, travel | No Comments »

Cool scooters galore – a video review of Vespa: Style in Motion

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

My acting talents have gone from strength to strength since we started making videos. In this one, you’ll see an Oscar-nominated ‘walk across the parking lot’ from me and then lots of useful information about a great book called Vespa: Style in Motion (it’s basically a biography of the famous Vespa scooter). Watch out for the stunt sequence where the scooter flies off a bridge while evading the police.

Who knew Steven Spielberg was a Vespa fan?

Posted in AbeBooks, design, review, travel, video | No Comments »

San Francisco’s used & rare bookshops: three of the best

Monday, September 26th, 2011

Last month I was in San Francisco and visited three booksellers who sell on AbeBooks. This is the video of what I saw in the Brick Row Book Shop, the Argonaut Book Shop and the Russian Hill Bookstore. All three are well established part of the Bay Area’s literary scene.

The Brick Row Book Shop can be found at 49 Geary Street. John Crichton is the owner and his business attracts collectors from around the world. Brick Row specializes in first editions, rare books and manuscripts from the 17th to the 20th centuries.

The Argonaut Book Shop on Sutter Street in the financial district. Like Brick Row, this shop has a long heritage. The Haines family has run this business since 1941. This seller specializes in books about history of California and the American West as well as Exploration and ephemera.

The Russian Hill Bookstore is owned by Carol Spencer. It’s a general used bookstore and buzzes with customers and has as a strong community feel. Carol, who has been selling books since the 1970s, offers books covering every genre from pulp paperbacks from the 1950s to cookbooks and modern bestsellers.

Posted in AbeBooks, booksellers, travel, video | No Comments »

The story of Agatha Christie’s Grand Tour to be published

Friday, September 23rd, 2011

The Guardian reports that HarperCollins is planning to publish a book about Agatha Christie’s ‘gap’ year. The crime writing author took a year-long trip in 1922 and visited Hawaii, Canada, USA, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

The book, The Grand Tour, will collect the previously unpublished letters and photos along with postcards, newspaper cuttings and memorabilia picked up by Christie on her journey. HarperCollins struck a deal to publish the collection next April with Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard and the Agatha Christie Archive Trust. Prichard, who is editing and introducing the book, called it a “valuable social record of its time” as well as “a nostalgic record of the happy days of [Christie's] first marriage to my grandfather”.

Posted in author, news, publishers, travel | No Comments »

Louise Penny & her powder blue VW

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011

Car salesmen (and women) should be lining up outside the house of Canadian author Louise Penny, especially if her new book, A Trick of the Light, is a bestseller. She buys cars based on color alone, according to the Globe & Mail, but I’m sure she’s not the only one.

I once asked Chuck Palahniuk what he spent his money on and said he’d just bought a new Toyota Tacoma truck. He’s not really a powder blue convertible sort of person.

Posted in author, travel | No Comments »

A list of top travel books suggested by travel writers

Monday, September 19th, 2011

Friday’s Guardian saw today’s travel writers picking their favorite travel books. Lots of wonderful travel books here – Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby, Destinations by Jan Morris and The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. I’m currently working my way through The World 1950-2000 by Jan Morris – last night I visited Odessa, Moscow and St Petersburg (a city formerly known as Petrograd and Leningrad). I settle down for a quiet read at the end of the day and Jan whisks me off to some corner of a globe (although Soviet-era Moscow did not appear very appealing).

Posted in author, lists, literature, travel | No Comments »

Review of The 8.55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames

Friday, September 16th, 2011

Here is the latest video review from AbeBooks – The 8.55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames. This book is about travel and Agatha Christie. Strictly speaking, it’s a travel memoir where the author follows in the train tracks of Christie who traveled from a sleepy suburb of London to Iraq where her second husband worked on archaeological digs. The author, famous for writing Murder on the Orient Express and many other crime classics, craved peace and quiet, and spent many months in the Middle East.

Eames’ journey includes a stretch on the Orient Express, and he visits to the Balkans, Istanbul, Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the days before the Allied invasion. We see Belgrade where women outnumber men and everyone lives for the moment. We feel the tension in Iraq as war looms. The reader also learns a lot about Christie, including her early years in Devon, her crime writing career, her infamous disappearance and her joy of living and working in the Middle East.

(PS – I’m sorry that I look like hobo in this video. I hadn’t shaved for a few days and I was running short of clean clothes that morning.)

Posted in AbeBooks, author, review, travel, video | No Comments »

AbeBooks visits Russell Books in Victoria, BC

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

If you ever visit our neck of the woods – Victoria, British Columbia that is – we urge you to visit Russell Books on Fort Street in the heart of downtown Victoria. AbeBooks and Russell Books have a long relationship as they were one of the first four booksellers to sell on AbeBooks back in 1996 when our business went live.

They are a general used bookstore but they also offer a decent selection of rare books and an increasing choice of new books. Whenever I go in, the store is bustling with customers and the staff, led by Jordan and Andrea Minter, are enthusiastic and knowledgeable. Browsing is easy and their business has grown so much that they have expanded into the premises next door.

Russell Books also offer free shipping in Canada and have close on 100,000 books online with AbeBooks. Pay them a visit sometime.

Posted in AbeBooks, booksellers, travel, video | No Comments »

Going global with Jan Morris

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

Last night I started reading something off the top of my ‘to read’ list – The World 1950-2000 by Jan Morris – and this morning I see Bookslut has a feature about her work as a travel writer but also a historian.

Morris is my favorite travel writer and this collection of her writing is going to whisk me around the globe. Imagine starting off your career by breaking the news that Sherpa Tenzing and Edmund Hillary has just climbed Mount Everest (she – when she was still a he – was the only journalist in the party) and doing it on Coronation Day?

Posted in author, travel, writing | No Comments »

A tour of Larry McMurtry’s personal library

Thursday, September 1st, 2011

James McAuley from the New Yorker’s super Book Bench blog goes to Archer City and what’s in Archer City, Texas – population 1,850? The answer is Larry McCurtry’s used bookstore – Booked Up. James was treated to a tour of McMurtry’s personal library.

Over the years, he’s bought twenty-six bookstores—the stock, not the business—lamenting what he called “the tragedy of the Gotham Book Mart,” and the demise of other great secondhand shops like Leary’s, in Philadelphia, and the Heritage, in Beverly Hills.

To honor their memory, McMurtry now collects signs from these ill-fated institutions. Booked Up customers can see his newest acquisition—the sign from Boston’s beloved Goodspeed’s Book Shop, which hung outside the store’s Beacon Hill location until it closed in 1993.

You can learn more about McMurtry’s passion for bookselling in his memoir, Books – here’s our review of that book.

Posted in author, booksellers, business, travel | No Comments »

Most literary graveyards

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011

The Publishers Weekly blog asks which graveyard is the most literary, and doesn’t even mention Highgate Cemetery in London.

Highgate’s East Cemetery contains:
Douglas Adams, novelist
Lucy Lane Clifford, novelist
George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans), novelist,
Karl Marx, economist
Dachine Rainer, poet

Highgate’s West Cemetery contains
Beryl Bainbridge, novelist
Lots of the Charles Dickens family but not Boz himself
John Galsworthy, author (memorial only)
Stella Gibbons, novelist
Radclyffe Hall, novelist
Christina Rossetti, poet

The big-hitters (Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Kipling) are all parked in Westminster Abbey but that’s not a bad list for a rank-and-file cemetery. I have always enjoyed wandering through graveyards and looking at the gravestones, and searching for the graves of the rich, famous and interesting.

In Oxfordshire, it’s almost impossible to find a graveyard without an author’s grave. Holywell Cemetery has Kenneth Grahame, Holy Trinity Churchyard in Headington has CS Lewis, Wolvercote has J. R. R. Tolkien, and that’s just for starters.

Posted in author, life, travel | No Comments »

Reading a book about old planes is a security threat

Friday, August 26th, 2011

It’s Friday and the world has gone a little more insane by another degree. Vance Gilbert is a folk singer and aviation enthusiast. He likes to read books about aviation history. He recently took a United Airlines flight from Boston to Washington DC, and naturally had a couple of books about old aircraft to read on his journey.

Apparently, a passenger reading books about aircraft is considered a security threat in these days of extreme paranoia. The jumpy cabin crew had the plane return to the gate. Gilbert was hauled off the aircraft and put in front of the airport goon squad. The Consumerist blog has the full and very sad story.

I was on a couple of short flights earlier this week and my selected read was The 8.55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames. It’s a travel memoir about riding the Orient Express and retracing a journey made by Agatha Christie on this historic train. But what the heck was I thinking? Baghdad is the capital of Iraq for heaven’s sake! I’ve got to choose my airplane reading more carefully in the future.

If you are a big fan of Biggles, then stay away from airplanes and airports at all costs. Reading Biggles Air Detective would earn you a life sentence under these conditions.

Posted in news, odd, reading, travel | No Comments »

The Help helping Mississippi tourism

Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011

Tourism bosses in Mississippi are hoping the success of The Help by Kathryn Stockett will attract more visitors to the state, reports the Clarion Ledger.