Monday, March 24, 2014

S7: Beaten Tracks

In the midst of planning a trip to the other side of the world, this Biblio-Mat book looked like it could give me some springboards on places to go. Unfortunately, it turned out to be completely useless for my purposes.

At least the cover is nic- oh wait...

Title: Beaten Tracks

Written by J. H. MacCallum Scott and published in 1938, Beaten Tracks is a travel book that looks very much like most travel books I’ve received from the Biblio-Mat.

Quite beaten indeed.

Looking through the table of contents, it seems quite fitting that the title of Beaten Tracks is missing the ‘Off the’ before it as the text covers the author’s travels to Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia, which may be among the most popular destinations today. Sadly, it doesn’t travel through Europe or Asia, which might have actually helped in my trip planning.

At least the photos were well done.

Despite looking quite generic, though, Beaten Tracks does have two interesting qualities about it. The first was the inner cover, which has a pretty fancy bookplate denoting that it comes from the library of Homer Morton Jaquays, who appears to have been a soldier of note.

And also a fisherman, it seems.

The second interesting aspect of the book is that all the black and white photographs have overlays of what I would guess to be vellum. In addition to protecting the image, the overlays also have captions and information about the image, which is a pretty cool design aspect.

Why are the photos so blurry?


Overlays!

All in all, Beaten Tracks appears to be a decent traveler’s guide, if for nothing else than being thick enough to be able to bludgeon an attacker should you find yourself in one of the sketchy areas covered within.

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