JF Ptak Science Books Post 2778
What is the world’s most traveled book? This question came to mind after I received an order for a book that had been sent to me from Florida after it arrived there from London, sending it off to someone in Baltimore. Does it go back to London after that and continue its travels?
Is the Most Traveled Book (MTB) a category of book, or a single title, or a single copy of that title? Is it thousands of people moving the book, or is it just the single book making the trip? If it was just a title, then the number of miles packed on Stephen King books traveling back and forth to the beach or wherever by millions of people over several decades would probably outweigh the travel of all of Homer on a galactic scale. My preference is for the single copy scenario. Also: I’d like this to be a published book rather than not, simply because the boundaries get a bit too misty for me.
The closer we come to the present time, the easier it would have been for a book and a person who might have been traveling with the book, to travel. It increases the chance for people to travel with a book, and with the invention of the middle class, it would encompass more people the chance to come in contact with books and travel with or send them. And of course it is the mode of transportation and the creation of parcel post that would add orders of magnitudes of miles to category—for example you could receive a book from London and send it out to Tokyo where it might be sent to Wellington all in two weeks. In 1822, raking in that sort of mileage would have been nearly impossible for almost all circumstances. No doubt books were carried to Botany Bay from London and then back again, perhaps over and over as the property of the ship’s surgeon or some such, but that would be years worth of travel.
Maybe it was books carried by people who were professional travelers or at least traveled a lot, like Napoleon or Alexander going to “work”.
Is it a travel book, like Herodotus, Sterne, Twain, Stark, (or even Kerouac who had the words right in the title?), Xenophon…Cervantes?
Perhaps it was literature—no doubt Shakespeare, Dante, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aeschylus have been hauled about for pleasure. What about professional books? I doubt that copies of Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, and so on have traveled very much on their own (though the ideas contained in them are probably among the best-traveled of that sort), but I suspect that anatomies (Vesalius, Gray) have some miles in them. There are no doubt other reference books like that that could have traveled save for their size (like Audubon, which could have been useful in the field but which would have needed their own caravan). There are unliekly titles that have made their way around the world (like Darwin’s Lyell making the long trip on the Beagle), but that book ended its travels when Darwin got home.
And what about military strategy books like Lao Tsu, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Thucydides? If in the field their owners could have lugged them far and wide, passing them along after enforced/sudden “retirement” or when their usefulness ran out.
What might establish the peripheries of this question are books that keep intact a belief system, or way of life, a secret-or-not codification of a state of well-being? A Bible? Alcoholics Anonymous? Probably that is the first place to visit, the religious book, though offhand it seems that the travel of this sort of book wouldn’t transcend one owner. The Bible and company are enormously popular books and have been printed no doubt in terms of billions of copies, so they have a much better chance of being the leader of the category by sheer numerical possibility. On the other hand some of them were tremendously popular but relatively short-lived, like the “Little Red Book”, which was carried by most Chinese for decades, though I doubt that the work as an inherited object was inter-generational.
Maybe the best traveled book simply comes down to one that belongs to an aircraft pilot of 40 years’ experience who has been flying with a single title because that is what they had with them on their very first flight, and has become a good luck token. Perhaps it is a King book, or Robert Pirsig; and maybe it is The Cat in the Hat which was an intended gift for a child, the pilot keeping the original as a charm for a successful first flight, and giving away another copy of the book, and so it has made thousands of flights. Maybe the book is never actually read—its just an icon.
Or perhaps it is an instruction booklet on the reading of nuclear codes and attack plans that has been basically airborne since 1960. This is far less romantic than a Dr. Seuss book, but more, well, “practical”.
And maybe the most traveled book is less-traveled than the most-traveled map?
