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  • Published: 16 November 2017
  • ISBN: 9781783524242
  • Imprint: Unbound Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400

Scraps of Wool

A Journey Through the Golden Age of Travel Writing



An enthralling anthology of the Golden Age of travel writing, with selections and contributions from today’s greatest living travel writers.

For more than forty years I have collected and read travel books... I marked passages that enthused me and so gathered a library that was annotated by triangular corner-folds and barely decipherable jottings. This was my own inadvertent wool-gathering...

Scraps of Wool is a celebration of travel writing, bringing together in a single volume passages that have enthralled generations of readers, encouraged them to dream of exploration and set off on journeys of their own.
Compiled by Bill Colegrave, its excerpts have been selected by today’s travel writers and journalists, who have revealed the books that influenced them: Dervla Murphy, Tony Wheeler, Rory MacLean, Pico Iyer, Jan Morris, Colin Thubron, Artemis Cooper, Sara Wheeler, Alexander Frater and many more.

Each of these scraps is a document of the writer’s passion for place – thick equatorial jungle, the soft ergs of the Sahara, Patagonian steppe – and each story, each memory will transport you to a different corner of the globe, and maybe even inspire you to plan your own great adventure.

  • Published: 16 November 2017
  • ISBN: 9781783524242
  • Imprint: Unbound Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 400

About the author

Bill Colegrave

Bill Colegrave has collected and been inspired by travel books for more than four decades. He also published them as owner of Cadogan Guides. His own book Halfway House to Heaven (2011) tells the story of his journey up the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan to find the source of the Oxus River in the High Pamirs. He has visited more than 110 countries. He has represented Great Britain (seniors) at real tennis and also in the World Pétanque Championships. He lives in London.

Praise for Scraps of Wool

A remarkable achievement ... these pages contain some of the finest prose in the English language

Alexander Frater

These are the high peaks of travel writing, each one a revelation or a memory revived ... a stirring collection

Tony Wheeler

If you love travel, then you will love this book

Timeless Travels