At book signings, it’s best to stand at the back of the line – that’s where the author’s friends, colleagues, and most dedicated readers congregate. For Pico Iyer at Books & Books Saturday morning, this group included his former editor at Time magazine, a schoolteacher carrying the letter he’d received from the author some twenty years earlier praising the story he’d published in the Sun-Sentinel on traveling to the Philippines in search of a wife, and a tall man dragging a bag filled with books.
Randall was a book collector and jazz guitarist, professor emeritus from the Frost School of Music. He had gotten hooked on travel writing, he said, after reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar.
I mentioned that I was a travel writer and Randall asked if I’d ever heard of Anthony Daniels. I said I had his book on Central America. “Sweet Waist of America,” he said, politely refraining from mentioning that the book covered only Guatemala. “He sometimes writes under another name,” I said. “Theodore Dalrymple,” Randall replied, quickly triaging my second memory lapse. (In my defense, the English writer, who is also a psychiatrist, rarely comes up in everyday conversation.) Randall informed me that Daniels wrote one book, a satire about Tanzania under the rule of Julius Nyerere, using the pen name Thursday Msigwa.
His favorite travel writer, he said, was Norman Lewis. I told him that Pico had visited Lewis, and written a delightful profile of him, a few years before he died. This seemed to be the sole fragment of travel writing to have escaped Randall’s notice. We moved on to my favorites: Patrick Leigh Fermor and Colin Thubron. Rarely had waiting in line been so enjoyable.
