Their Eight-Hundred-Mile Canal Voyage through
Belgium, Brittany, Touraine, Gascony and Languedoc:
Being an Account of Backdoors Life on Bargeman's Highway.
by Melville Chater.
This, (like Stephenson's An Inland Voyage ,) is canoeing as literature! A literary lion of the thirties, Chater and his wife Lucine faced demolition of their house in New York to be replaced by an apartment building, (yes the developers were raping and pillaging even then) and decided that, since they would soon be homeless, they might as well take a canoe trip through Europe before they tried to find another place to live. This is the chronicle of that adventure. There is much to share between Stephenson and Chater in this volume;--while their exact route was not similar their views and inspirations from the environs were not at all dissimilar. Even the writing has an echo; one to the other. In each volume there are phrases, paragraphs, sometimes whole pages you want to underline and highlight. Of course, you do not do this! Marking a book in any way is a sacrilege and a sin! That's why we include a red, silk, ribbon-book mark in our hard-bound volumes; you wouldn't crease your dog's ear to remember to feed him would you! Another great benefit of this book is the photography of the people by Chater. There are snapshots of the adventure, but the photographs of the peasantry and the lock-keepers are special. These are painterly photographs indeed! Another, is that they took their adventure in 1932, just a few short months before Europe would become a charnel house. There is a poignency in that alone. But back to those photographs; you will not see their like again. This was Europe in its last stages of the old world! Costumes, customs, people;--precious to us now indeed! Fifty photographs.
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