“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. . . We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others.”— C.S. Lewis
VINTAGE LENSES ON THE WORLD THAT WAS is a series, two titles per year for an initially projected 12 titles, of beautiful newly-designed paperback editions, all with maps and indices, of late 19th and early 20th century English-language travel memoir.
Selected by award-winning literary travel writer C.M. Mayo, these fascinating and vivid masterworks form a vital part of our English language literary heritage. Now more than a century old, many of these works have been nearly forgotten, or, in many instances, languishing in the shadows cast by these authors’ more celebrated novels, short stories, plays, or poetry. Nonetheless, the travel memoirs of these writers, with their outsized relish for adventure, their curiosity, and their art with words, have much to show we readers of their far future, both of their world as it was and how they, as unique individuals nested in their own particular culture, saw it. Whether charming or confounding, or both, these works invite us to ponder our own place and our own ideas as we wing through our own sliver of time in this ever-changing world.
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