Booking Passage
- Tunner: “We must be the first tourists since the war.”
Kit: “We’re not tourists. We’re travelers.”
Tunner: “Oh. What’s the difference?”
Port: “A tourist thinks about going home the moment they arrive, Tunner.
Kit: “Whereas a traveler might not come back at all.”
- From the film “The Sheltering Sky”, Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (original novel by Paul Bowles)
Literary travel is a particular fascination of mine. Reading guidebooks, especially in anticipation of actually traveling to a specific destination, has never been a prerequisite (although Lonely Planet, Bradt and Moon have all figured in many of the foreign locales I have visited).
No, I prefer to consult the likes of Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, James Joyce or my personal favorite, Evelyn Waugh, whose “When The Going Was Good” I consider the best travel book ever written.
I recently discovered the bookstore of my dreams - Idelewild Books in New York City. In a small sidebar article in the Travel section of a recent issue of the Sunday New York Times, they present a short piece on this store and the pleasures to be discovered within.
As if you needed another reason to travel to NYC, you just found a new one.
[REW]