Travel Blog

I've been cleaning my bookshelves, taking books out and assessing the damage done by silverfish. The insects are bilingual and seem to have a taste for modern classics. I need a new copy of H.L. Mencken's Newspaper Days and Norman Lewis's A Dragon Apparent; each cover - pitted with excavations that have the shape of small caterpillars - is now completely detached from the rest of the book. 

These books deposit small piles of dust on the shelf, and then rain more dust down on the floor as I open them up and loosen their jackets (if they have  jackets; for years my practice was to remove book jackets to make my collection look more like a library). Even the books that are still intact leave lines of dust on the shelf, in black, red, and all shades of brown (from khaki to dark chocolate), that I sweep into a dustpan.

Yesterday I came upon a book I hadn't looked at in years: The World Around Danilo Dolci by Jerre Mangione. I had received it from the author, whom I'd gotten to know in Philadelphia in the '80s, after we'd been introduced by the film critic Vernon Young. I was working at the American College of Physicians then, writing feature stories about doctors and dreaming of making a living as a writer as both of these men had done. 

Opening up The World Around Danilo Dolci I found an inscription: "For Tom Swick - with a toast to his travel writing future. Best wishes, Jerre Mangione." It was a lovely thing for him to write, especially since, at the time, I had published a grand total of two travel stories. I had forgotten all about the inscription and, reading it yesterday, I wondered if, subconsciously, I had used it as inspiration all these years.

(I'm off to Philadelphia tomorrow, and then Boston - Quaker Philadelphia and Puritan Boston, as another Philly acquaintance, John Lukacs, called them - coming back here on the 21st.)