My Favorite Travel Book

Named by some of the world's foremost travel writers.

The Lost Art of Postcard Writing

I'm not entirely sure it's an art form, but, alas, sending postcards is going the way of the dodo. NOOOO!!!

From an article in the New York Review of Books...

Unlike letter writing, there never has been, and there never could be, an anthology of the best of postcard writing, because when people collect postcards, it’s usually for reasons other than their literary qualities. If there was such a book, I’m sure it would contain hundreds of anonymous masterpieces of this minimalist art, since unlike letters, cards require a verbal concision that can rise to high level of eloquence: brief and heart-breaking glimpses into someone’s existence, in addition to countless amusing and well-told anecdotes. Now and then one encounters in antique shops and used book stores boxes full of old postcards valued for their antiquity, their images and their stamps. The writing found on them most often tends to be in faded ink and hard to read. To anyone with plenty of time on their hands, I recommend reading a bunch of them. Postcards continued to be used by people of modest means to convey important family news long after telephones ceased to be a novelty. I once came across one that said:

Francis Brown died last night, funeral on Tuesday.

That was all there was. The image on the other side of the card was of a famous race horse from 1920s, so I immediately pictured Mr. Brown with a straw hat, a cane in his gloved hand and carnation in his lapel, stopping for a beer in a saloon before catching the streetcar to go to the track in Boston or San Francisco.

So, dear reader, if you happen, on your daily rounds, to come across in a coffee shop or a restaurant some poor soul sitting alone over a postcard and visibly struggling with what to write, take pity on him or her. They are the last of a species, and are almost certainly middle aged or elderly, already nervous and worried about all the problems older people face in this country.

Manuscript Stolen from a Spanish Cathedral

Time Magazine takes note of the theft of the priceless one-of-a-kind Codex Calixtinus.

From the piece...

The illuminated Codex was apparently removed from the cathedral archives on July 5 and reported missing to police the following day. At a press conference on Thursday, the cathedral deacon, José María Díaz, said that only he and two other archivists had access to the manuscript and that one of them had last seen the document on June 30 or July 1. Although the Codex was taken without signs of forced entry, Díaz said, "We have been victims of a terrible attack."

Written in the mid-1100s under the auspices of Pope Calixtus II, the Codex is about the apostle St. James, whose remains are believed to have miraculously washed up on the coast of northwestern Spain. The town that houses his tomb, which became known as Santiago de Compostela (Santiago means "St. James" in Spanish), was transformed in the Middle Ages into a major pilgrimage site — the third most important, after Jerusalem and Rome — for Christians from all over Europe. Indeed, book five of the Codex is a sort of a Michelin guide to Santiago, helpfully instructing pilgrims on the best routes to take and the poisonous rivers to avoid. "It is one of the most important texts of the Middle Ages and of incalculable value," says Jesus Tanco, a St. James expert at the University of Navarra.