Let the trumpet sound!

My guide/anthology on Romania is now ready – number four on my website - its called “Mapping Romania – notes from an unfinished journey” and can actually be accessed directly on the link embedded in the title

As far as I’m aware, it’s a unique guide and not only for Romania! I’m actually not aware of any other E-book which tries to penetrate a country’s soul (as it were) by giving such immediate access (through hyperlinks – 400 of them) to books, blogs, paintings, music, photographs, for example.

Not that I’m an expert on E-books – in fact, truth be told, I;ve never even looked at one!! Up until now I thought they were just (rather bad) substitutes for the real thing – but I can now see their potential…

To complete the guide in time for my daughter’s arrival I had to leave unread about 30 books which had arrived since I started the work some 4 weeks ago. One of the first I picked up at the weekend was Paddy Leigh-Fermour’s The Broken Road - the last part of the famous trilogy of a walk through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria in the early 1930s which was, however, transcribed into two books in the 1970s and 1980s and finished posthumously just a year or so ago. I had waited for the paperback version to be published and eagerly picked it up from Bucharest's English Bookshop in April.

Yesterday I reached his chapter on Bucharest – so moving to see the city and some of the characters he bumps into painted in such a vivid manner 80 years later – but as fresh as he had just written it (which in a sense he had!). By coincidence, the New York Review of Books arrived in my (electronic) mail this very morning and with an article assessing Paddy’s writings as a whole and posing the question whether he is our greatest travel writer.

Overnight I had realised that I had forgotten to put Nick Hunt’s occasional blogposts during his journey following in Paddy’s footprints  into the list of “goodies” which I had given recently as a “taster” for the guide. 

I have noticed, however, that this hyperlink does not appear to be working in the pdf file. My apologies – I clearly need to check them all – and put a final version online – in a few weeks!

In the meantime Nick Hunt’s After the Woods and Water blogposts can be read here. Obviously someone who is walking several thousand kilometres is not hugging a laptop with him but, somehow, he was able to post a few thoughts. Only one, however, in Romania - and that in the Retezat mountain peaks