The best travel writing
is in another language.

I did not set out to run a press. I went looking for one book, found nobody had put it into English, and then found the same was true of the books on either side of it. That is the pattern. A firsthand account gets written in French or Russian or Portuguese, gets read closely for a generation by people who read that language, and then stops travelling. Specialists keep citing it for another century. Everyone else never learns it existed.

The scale is hard to hold in your head. Every national library in Europe holds shelves of eyewitness reporting from places that were difficult to reach and are now unrecognisable. What a coastline looked like before the survey. How a city worked before the railway. What a naturalist saw before the species went. Some of it is dull. A surprising amount is extraordinary, and in a specific way: you are reading someone finding out, in the order they found it, with the wrong guesses left in.

In 1875 a traveller wrote down the names Huaina-Picchu and Matcho-Picchu, traced them into an old pamphlet, and rode the other way. That sentence sat in French for a hundred and forty-six years.

We go and get those books. A full translation from the first edition, the author's own notes kept intact, editorial notes where a modern reader needs them, the original engravings, and a record of every place the page defeated us. We print the result as an object worth keeping, because a account that took two years on mule-back deserves better than a scanned facsimile nobody opens.

What we look for

One test, applied first: did the writer go, and did they write down what they actually saw? We take firsthand records. Expedition narratives, survey reports, field journals, the notebooks of people who measured things nobody had measured. Not commentary, not compilations, not histories assembled from other people's travels.

After that it is a judgement about whether the book still has something to say. Some do not. A great many nineteenth-century travellers were tedious, and being untranslated is not a qualification by itself. We are looking for the ones where the observation is sharp enough that you would want to read it even if it had been written last year, and where the record is the only one of its kind: the last description of a place before it changed, or the first measurement anyone made of something.

How a book gets made here

We start from the best surviving scan and rebuild the text from it. Old type and old paper defeat optical character recognition in ways which look fluent and read wrong, so nothing goes in on the strength of looking plausible. Where a figure or a date will not resolve, we go back to the page image. Where the page itself is damaged, we say so on the page rather than smoothing it over.

Two rules do most of the work. We never supply a reading because it seems likely. And where a passage carries its own check, a printed total or a sum restated in another currency, the check confirms a reading and never manufactures one. Some disagreements survive into the finished book unresolved, because the original leaves them unresolved.

We do not improve these authors. Several of them held views their century held and ours does not, and one of them did something on a riverbank you will not forget. It is translated as written, annotated plainly, and left there. An edition which quietly tidied its author would be worth less than one which does not.

Why it is worth doing now

Two things changed. The scans exist: libraries spent twenty years photographing their holdings, so the raw material is reachable from anywhere for the first time. And the places these books describe have moved further away from us, which makes an eyewitness account of them worth more, not less. A description of the Urubamba before the railway is not a curiosity. It is the record.

What has not changed is that somebody still has to do the translation, sentence by sentence, and check the figures against the page. No machine has done this well and the scans have been sitting there for a decade waiting.

What we hope you take from it

Curiosity, mostly. There is far more eyewitness reporting in the world than the reading lists suggest, and the people who did it were sharper than the summaries make them sound. The recovery has barely started. The limit is not what survived. Nearly all of it survived. The limit is how many of these accounts anyone has bothered to carry into English, and the honest answer is almost none of them.

Buying a book pays for the next translation. That is the whole economic model and we would rather state it plainly than dress it up. Read the entries first. If one of them makes you want the book, the rest follows.