Beaten tracks.

Item Details

London, UK:, Travel Book Club,, [1938]., Hardcover

First Travel Book Club Edition, NF/NF

Thick 8vo. [8], 288 pp. Photo frontisp., numerous photo plates, all w/ printed tissue guards. Quarter-green publisher’s cloth over cream-coloured boards, dark blue lettering on spine (slight shelfwear), w/ d.j. vivid Art Deco cover art, NF/NF copy, w/ former ownership markings dated 1938 on ffep.

First Travel Book Club edition of this relatively uncommon, and well-written travelogue describing the adventures by the author and his wife Nora as they began their around-the-world journeys by a transcontinental drive of 15,000 miles across the U.S. and Mexico as both countries slowly emerged from the depths of the Great Depression. There travels in the South run up against virulent support for the Confederacy, and racist Jim Crow laws, visit Native American reservations, and “Indian Schools” for re-education in the Southwest, and then an extended trip up and down the West coast, and into California in their used touring car named “Belinda.” Very scarce in original dustjacket. Scott (1911-1974) was the son of Alexander Scott (1874-1928) who worked as private secretary to Winston Churchill, and was his first biographer, later dying with his wife off Victoria, British Columbia in an airplane accident. Scott himself later was active in the Liberal Party and contested the 1945 General Election at Leeds North.