Author: [HALSEY (Tappen):
Title: A Little Travel.
Description: No place Printed by Albert F. Allen [from colophon] [c. 1895] FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. 8vo, 200 x 130 mms., pp. [3] 4 - 184, minimal title-page, bound in sturdy buckram, title on front cover, with inscription on verso of front free end-paper: "With the Compliments of / 'The Pilgrim' / Tappen Halsey / 1895"; small water-stain on front cover, but a very good copy, printed on thick paper. Tappen Halsey was a well-known citizen of Chicago in the late nineteenth century, being a businessman who owned several pharmacies in Illinois and Michigan. He seems not, however, to be generally known as a traveller or travel writer, and this appears to be the only copy known of his extensive account of his voyaging.Halsey travelled through at least seven countries, Algeria, Spain, Italy, France, Monaco, Switzerland, and Britain. Halsey was a sympathetic traveller with an eye for revealing detail. He reports, for instance, on the ubiquity of telephones in Switzerland (in 1895!). In Italy, he visits the Vatican, and observes that the big toe of a medieval bronze statue of St. Peter has been "kissed away" by the daily kisses of the faithful over six centuries (p. 61). With his wife he purchases a painting done on cobweb, which he notes is a specialty found only among the Tyrolese. He has first-hand encounters with the famous -- hearing, for instance, both Farrar and Wilberforce preach in London, being particularly impressed with the former. Brits come off rather badly at one point, as Mr and Mrs Halsey witness "more drunkenness and wretchedness in London in one day than in all our travel" (p. 180). The fellow Americans that Halsey meets touring in Europe come off rather poorly too, since, he says, "Americans have much to learn in regard of patience, and gentle regard for others, before they will equal the French, German, Austrian or even Italian travelers" (p. 73). Thank goodness times have changed, and every American abroad these days is patient as pie, gentle as a dove. Harold F. Smith, who compiled the standard bibliography of such literature, has not only no entry of this item but none on our author (Harold F. Smith, American Travellers Abroad: A Bibliography of Accounts Published before 1900, 2nd ed., 1999). No other copy located: not in WorldCat, COPAC, KVK, British Library, or the Library of Congress. It is not in Melvyl, nor is it in any of the several Chicago libraries that I have checked.

Keywords: Travel Europe prose


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