Not this year - or next...

Saturday's Travel Guardian has a feature on walking holidays - described as "short-haul", though I'm not convinced that anything involving air travel really deserves that label. Still, these look interesting:

• walking as an introduction to Basque culture, billed in the Guardian as preneanexperience.com, but this URL reverts automatically to www.spanishlanguagewalkingholidays.com - Spanish language is optional, on this holiday at least, and they pick up from the airport at Biarritz.


• In the footsteps of Dali in the western Pyrenees - not because I'm a huge fan of Dali, but because walking from France into Spain along the coast sounds good. It's described as 'introductory to moderate', but then so is this Corsican package, which makes me wonder...

ETA: Another article about Pyrenean Experience and the Basque country.

Rick Gekoski: Tolkien's Gown

Part of my haul from the charity shops of Richmond: bought mostly for its wonderful title, but also because it was only a couple of quid, and random pages were entirely readable.

Gekoski is a rare book dealer; that is, he buys and sells individual books which are desirable because they are first editions, or inscribed by the author, or in some other way which has nothing to do with the quality of the text. He is perfectly capable of talking about the content of books; I loved this, for example:

"Like many readers, I never finished The Satanic Verses. On every page I found something to admire: an aperçu, a fabulously wrought phrase, an odd angle of vision that made me smile. It had genius, but there was something unrelentingly same-y about the prose, and the succession of scenes, that made me feel that, after a few hundred pages, I'd had enough. I wasn't disappointed exactly, just prematurely satisfied."

"prematurely satisfied" - oh, yes! I've read books that I've really liked and admired, yet felt no urge to look for more by the same author - now I have a phrase to describe my reaction.

But this is almost entirely not what this book is about. More typical is the chapter which begins with Gekoski's catalogue entry for a copy of the first English edition of Lolita, signed by Nabokov to his cousin, priced at £3,250. This drew a response from Graham Greene, enquiring, if this copy - "which isn't even the true first edition" - is worth so much, how much was his own signed copy of the original Paris edition worth. Gekoski's reply, in full, was:

Dear Mr Greene,
More. Would you care to sell it?
Yours sincerely,
Rick Gekoski

And so on. The book is based on a series of radio talks, but rewritten; in the absence of the archive clips which illustrated the broadcast version, Gekoski has had room to extend his own stories, and he tells them well. It's an entertaining book rather than a life changing one, though I admit to a certain frisson at even a third hand contact with these treasures - and yes, Gekoski did at one point own Tolkien's gown.