The grand tour in photo albums
By Marie Moebius

Book Signing Barbara Levine Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums Fri, Nov 17, 6pm La Librería la Deriva Fábrica la Aurora

“I’m a peculiar traveler. My preferred form of transport is vintage travel albums.” These are Barbara Levine’s introductory words to her newly published book Around the World: The Grand Tour in Photo Albums (Princeton Architectural Press, New York). The author takes readers through time and space—from Cairo to Burma and back again. She transports them to the dawn of world travel when, Brownie cameras in tow, the middle class toured the world for the first time and painstakingly documented their discoveries in scrapbooks, diary entries and pasted-on souvenir postcards.

Around the World traces the development of the travel photo album, from narrative forms, ship’s logs and diaries into a rich multimedia collection of objects of sublime beauty. The book features a wealth of turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographs and ephemera such as ship menus, calling cards and newspaper clippings.

Two sample narratives that unfold in the beautifully designed book are San Francisco flapper Vera Talbot’s Far East adventure told in snapshots, passenger lists, itineraries and postcards, and Chicagoan Clara E. Whitcomb’s travel diary filled with souvenir photos, maps and a list of titles for a future book about her travels in Egypt. 

On the same theme, Barbara Levine previously published Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album (also Princeton Architectural Press). Levine runs Project B, an international exhibition and curatorial services company. She was formerly director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and deputy director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

She will present and sign her new book on Friday at Fábrica la Aurora. Lulu Torbet will talk on photography that same day at the Generator Gallery.

Marie Moebius is a bookseller and the owner of Librería la Deriva.

Book Fever

Taking the pulse of Bill Bryson
By Marcia Loy



“Why are [Bryson’s books] so dazzlingly good? The simple answer: Bryson is funny…intelligent, witty and sensitive to the absurd… Perhaps you are familiar with a writer that has Bryson’s mastery of language, wit, fascination with history and statistics, or impeccable comic timing (although if you are, please tell me—I’ve been looking for books that make me laugh like this for years).”

—Chicago Tribune

All of the books mentioned in this column are in the library.

My favorite film director is Billy Wilder because he directed great dramas (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard) and great comedy (Some Like It Hot). Bill Bryson is the Billy Wilder of non-fiction. He writes travel books about England (Notes From a Small Island), Europe (Neither Here Nor There), Australia (In a Sunburned Country). He writes environmental commentary (A Walk in the Woods). He writes about science (A Short History of Nearly Everything) and about English (The Mother Tongue, Made in America). And he does it all with grace, style and a terrific sense of humor. His only character flaw, as far as I can tell, is that he’s a St. Louis Cardinal fan, anathema to a Cub fan like me. I take comfort in the fact that though he may have bad taste in teams, at least he likes baseball.


Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, 1991. Bryson leaves his home in Yorkshire and goes from Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost town in Europe (to see the Northern Lights) to Istanbul, Turkey. Along the way he visits Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and points between. An entertaining and funny trip through Europe.

Excerpt: “I know Baron Haussmann made Paris a grand place to look at, but the man had no concept of traffic flow. At the Arc de Triomphe alone thirteen roads come together. Can you imagine that? I mean to say, here you have a city with the world’s most pathologically aggressive drivers—drivers who in other circumstances would be given injections of thorazine from syringes the size of bicycle pumps and confined to their beds with leather straps—and you give them an open space where they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or what?”


Notes From a Small Island, 1995. Bryson, who was born in the US, moved to England in 1973 and stayed for 20 years. He traveled around to look at his adopted country before he returned to the US because, he writes, “I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.” He records the idiosyncrasies of the British with wit and fondness.

Excerpt: “Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in track suits somewhere to go for the day. Because it was heavily bombed in the war, it fell into the hands of postwar town planners and in consequence looks like something left over from a 1957 Exposition du Cément. An alarming number of structures…seem to have been modeled on supermarket packaging, primarily packets of Jacob’s Cream Crackers. A few even extend across roads—always a sign of 1950s planners smitten with the novel possibilities of concrete. One of the main buildings in the center, it almost goes without saying, is a Holiday Inn/cornflakes box.”

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, 1998. On returning to the United States and settling in New Hampshire, Bryson decides to walk the Appalachian Trail 2,100 miles, from north Georgia to northern Maine. His old friend, Katz, who appeared in Neither Here Nor There and later in his memoir, asks to join him. What results is a hilarious trip full of bizarre encounters with other hikers and the history of the Trail, as well as an indictment of the US National Forest Service. This might be my favorite of his books, though I’m a Stranger Here Myself would come close.

Excerpt from a conversation with a fellow who drove Bryson and Katz from Atlanta to the setting-off point of the trip. “Just last week I had three ladies from California—middle-aged gals, real nice, kind of giggly but, you know, nice—I dropped them off and they were in real high spirits. About four hours later they called and said they wanted to go home. They’d come all the way from California, you understand, spent God knows how much on airfares and equipment—I mean, they had the nicest stuff you ever saw, all brand new and top of the range—and they’d walked maybe a mile and a half before quitting. Said it wasn’t what they expected.” “What do they expect?” “Who knows? Escalators maybe.”


A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2003. This is a book about science, for goodness sake. I don’t understand science. I don’t like it. I don’t like books about science. I don’t read them. But I read this because Bryson wrote it. And after I started, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a book about science, for goodness sake, and it’s a page turner. Who would have thought?

Excerpt: “Astronomers these days can do the most amazing things. If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare. From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars they can infer the size and character and even potential habitability of planets much too remote to be seen—planets so distant that it would take us half a million years in a spaceship to get there. With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is “less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground,” in the words of Carl Sagan.”

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, 2006. Bryson was born in 1951 in Des Moines, Iowa in a time when print ads proclaimed, “More Doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette!” If you bought a major appliance, the neighbors came over to have a look and the United States enjoyed unparalleled prosperity. 

Excerpt: “We didn’t call it the kitchen in our house. We called it the Burns Unit. “It’s a bit burned,” my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something—a much-loved pet perhaps—salvaged from a tragic house fire. “But I think I scraped off most of the burned part,” she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh.”


Other Bryson books in the library: Notes From a Big Country, The Palace Under the Alps.

Next week: What nonfiction others are reading in San Miguel. The following week: More nonfiction recommendations. Next month: My favorite fiction. If you’d like to contribute your favorite book in this category, please email me at marciabookfever@hotmail.com with a few lines about the book and a short quote from it, usually the first paragraph unless you find something more intriguing you want to use. Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.