Hope for Bird's *Travels*

The nice lady who runs Metropolis Books down on Main (the other direction from the Nickel Diner, if you are standing at the corner of 5th and Main) has very kindly helped me look for a copy of Isabella Bird's *Travels in Persia and Kurdistan* that is complete. She sympathized with my trauma over the previous copy I had that ended with "Volume One." We also found a likely copy of Nellie Bly's account of recreating Verne's *Around the World in Eighty Days*. I believe she did it in something just over seventy. *And* we found some Mary Kingsley, so I am happy. Gawd I just LOVE a brick and mortar shop! As a wise and kind magicianne who works in one of the brick and mortar magic shops I like has observed--"the computer can't point you to what you don't know about; a live person can." So true, so true.

Will we find search engines narrowing our inquiries? What happens when you can't just graze the library bookshelves, or chat with adepts or crazies?

I finished Bird's *Travels*!

only to discover I only had *Volume One*! Feh! So here I am, left in the middle of territory largely unknown by Europeans in 1890, with Isabella Bird doing quite nicely thank you amid the "fierce savages" who are treating her very kindly as she doles out cough treatments and eye drops, and I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! Apparently Virago Travellers only published this one volume back in the day, and I am beside myself with figuring out what comes next. I putter about on Amazon.com, but what help is that, with the not being able to *handle* the books, and *look* at them? Gah!

Isabella Bird

Talk about someone who walked around and looked at things! Regretfully I near the end of her book, Journeys In Persia And Kurdistan. (Virago Press, 1988.) Like much travel writing, it is an utterly engrossing read about one miserable day after another, punctuated by some relief and some pleasure. As I slowly emerge from such texts, I shake my head over their strange power to absorb my attention and grant such pleasure. With historical texts there is the added spell of the sense of a portal opening up in time and allowing one to look if not enter, in this case, Persia of 1890.

(If you like that sort of thing, I cannot too highly commend to your attention old stereoscope cards. The very dust off the Pyramids stings your lips as you gaze through the shaded lens at the old photos. I'm not quite clear on this, but my beloved gives me to understand that 3-D photography is making a resurgence in astronomy, so run off to your local antiques mall and snatch them up while you still can. Sometimes old Viewmaster reels reprinted old stereoscopic images too.)