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The books of Isabella L. Bird
January 31, 2008 | 11:46 am
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By Paul Biba
The Victorians were remarkable people in many ways, and the women most of all. Isabella L. Bird was one of those lone female travelers who were spawned during this era. She traveled, alone, to Japan in 1878, Tibet, India, Persia, the American West, Hawaii, China, Morocco and more. All the while she wrote journals of her travels, which were widely published. In 1892 she became the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society.
I recently bought the Dover edition of her “Unbeaten Tracks in Japan” (ebooks aside, isn’t Dover one the publishing industry’s great treasures!) and decided to see if any of her works were available in ebook form. Well, Manybooks has five of them, including Japan, in many different reading formats. Since they are Gutenberg editions they don’t have the wonderful illustrations that are in the Dover edition, at least in the Japan book, but otherwise they are now accessible to the ereading public. I’m about half way through the Japan one and I strongly recommend her work to all our ebook readers.
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Comments:
Thanks! Just downloaded the Japan book. I love posts like this that point to the treasures out there in the public domain. Another reminder, as if one were needed, of why copyright reform is so important. Think of all those good books from the 1930s and 40s that are out there in copyright limbo, un-reprintable because of sparse demand and thus unavailable to a potential new readership. — Paul
Wow. She got there before Lafcadio Hearn!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn
(Hearn is available in e. If you can’t find him, leave a Comment here and I’ll post an URL.)
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is amazing. She traveled alone by horse through the American West in the late 1800′s, and wrote about it all to her sister. Great stuff.