travel

First published in 1942, Beryl Markham's "West with the Night," account of her expatriate life in Africa as a well-born English woman, horse trainer, and bush pilot was well received by critics, including Ernest Hemingway. She was the first woman to fly from Europe to North America solo in 1936. Her original book was re-published in the 1980s and was acclaimed by new readers who made it a best seller. This particular edition was published in 1989 and contains photographs and illustrations not in the original work.    

The Caledonian railway, or The Caley as it was fondly named, was a Scottish railway system that connected Scotland to London from the 1840’s until its dissolution in the 1920’s. This compilation of book excerpts, articles, news clippings, and advertisements chronicles and romanticizes the waning decades of the Caledonian Railway from the turn of the century until 1923 when The Caley was absorbed into the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway by The Railways Act of 1921, an act that streamlined 120 individual British railway systems into just four.

“Civilization Follows the Improved Highway.” That was and still is the motto of the enduring and always alluring travel magazine Arizona Highways.  It was first published in 1925 as an engineering newsletter by the Arizona Highway Department. By the 1930s, it had segued into a magazine documenting the road construction of the expanding highway system throughout Arizona. In the 1940s, the magazine excelled as one of the first color illustrated travel magazines at the forefront of color printing technology.

This 1906 volume features essays written by notable travelers who visited the West, including John Wesley Powell (who was the first director of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology and whom the Smithsonian's Anthropology Library is named after), artist Thomas Moran, geologist R.D. Salisbury, poet Harriet Monroe, and others. It is illustrated with many black and white photographs, showing the beauty and majesty of the Grand Canyon.

Beginning in late 1863, author J. Ross Browne accompanied Charles D. Poston on his tour of Arizona as the territory’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs. This book recounts their adventure, presenting a vivid, colorful description of the area and of the terrors which then attended border life in Arizona, where one-twentieth of the population had been swept away by the attacks of the Apaches in three years. Browne's travelogue also contains details on early mining in addition to observations of the lands and people he encountered.

In 1871, seventeen-year-old Fred Dellenbaugh, under the lead of Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War hero and the first director of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, journeyed into the Grand Canyon and its subsidiary canyons and rivers with the intention of exploring, mapping, and recording descriptions of the uncharted territory. The men found themselves battling the great force of the Colorado River, with its fatal, quick rapids and mighty waterfalls. This is Dellenbaugh’s personal story, written thirty years after the great adventure.

“Go to the National Museum in Washington, and I venture the assertion you will find there more objects of universal interest and wonder gained from Arizona, than from any other country you can name.” So states George Wharton James in the forward to Arizona, the Wonderland. James was an enthusiast of the American Southwest who wrote over 40 books about the region, including this tribute to Arizona, an unabashedly enthusiastic travelogue.

These stunningly ornamental canoe prows glide through the coastal waterways of the Cameroon, where the Duala people live. German anthropologist Leo Frobenius traveled to this bucolic West African setting and documented his findings in this 1897 book. To make this piece even more special, it is one of only nine copies that exist in the United States.

This rare catalogue of an exhibition in Paris in 1883 – held by only six libraries in the U.S. – provides descriptions and brief historical explanations of 102 antiquities from Mexico and the Yucatan that famed French archaeologist Désiré Charnay (1828-1915) acquired during an expedition of 1880-1882, including plans of newly discovered Toltec palaces, Aztec statues and funeral urns, and bas-reliefs found in Yucatan villages.