Egyptian Book of the Dead on display at Brooklyn Museum

by Sean McLachlan on


After three years of careful study and restoration, an important version of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead has gone on display in the Brooklyn Museum.

The Book of the Dead was a collection of prayers, spells, and rituals to help the dead in the afterlife. The book has its roots in prehistoric times. As the civilization in Egypt developed, the prayers and spells became more elaborate. Eventually they were gathered together in chapters to create what we call the Book of the Dead. Individual chapters or sets of chapters were written on tombs, mummy cases, and rolls of papyrus. Many burials have portions of the book, one of the largest being the Papyrus of Ani, which you can view online.

The Brooklyn Museum example was for the tomb of Sobekmose, a gold worker. It’s an early and long version, probably dating to the reign of Thutmose III or Amunhotep II (c. 1479–1400 BC). It’s 25 feet long, written on both sides, and contains nearly half of the known Book of the Dead chapters.

Portions of this book have long been on display at the museum. This is the first time the entire book is on display.

[Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Random Acts of Debauchery on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast

by David Farley on
In the 1850s, the San Francisco Herald published a story that began like this:

“There are certain spots in our city, infested by the most abandoned men and women, that have acquired a reputation little better than the Five Points of New York or St. Giles of London. [It] is crowded by thieves, gamblers, low women, drunken sailors, and similar characters, who resort to the groggeries that line the street, and there spend the night in the most hideous orgies.”


In Herbert Asbury’s “The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld,” he writes about random acts of debauchery on San Francisco’s Barbary Coast. Some favorites include a saloon called the the Fierce Grizzly, literally named because there was a live bear chained by the door. The bar served a milk cocktail, usually mixed with gin or whisky. When a preacher showed up one day at the Fierce Grizzly hoping to get some material for a future sermon on the den of iniquity that was the Barbary Coast, he was offered a glass of such “milk.”
“What do you call that?” he asked after taking a sip and then a larger sip.

“Just milk,” said the bartender.

“Ah!” the preacher exclaimed. “What a glorious cow.”

Not to be outdone, the Boar’s Head also offered entertainment involving the animal kingdom. Asbury writes, “The principal attraction was a sexual exhibition in which a woman and a boar participated.” He didn’t go into detail, leaving it to our wildest imaginations.

In the next few days, I’ll go searching for the debaucherous spirit of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco today. Let us hope there are no pigs or bears–at least not of the animal variety–in my future.

The secret formula for writing a successful travel narrative

by Don George on

For years people have been asking me for the secret formula for writing a successful travel story. I did my best to conjure this formula into my book Travel Writing, but as you know, there really isn’t any secret formula. Or is there? This year, in preparing for a spate of appearances where I was talking about travel writing – notably TBEX, a talk with Julia Cosgrove of Afar magazine, and a one-day in-the-field writing workshop that was part of the Book Passage travel writing and photography conference — I realized that I could distill what I’ve learned in three decades on both sides of the writer-editor relationship into a few pithy points.

So here’s my version of the secret formula.First of all, what is a travel story? There are many different kinds of travel stories, of course, but the kind I’m focusing on here is the travel narrative. Here’s my definition: A travel narrative is the crafted evocation of a journey, usually written in the first person, that is structured as a sequence of anecdotes/scenes, and that presents a quest that illuminates a place and culture.

Which brings us to a very important point: The narrative should have a theme – lesson, message, point, illumination – that you as the writer are trying to convey to the reader. If you don’t know what you’re writing about, then there’s no way the reader — or editor — is going to know, so don’t write your story until you know what you’re trying to say. Well, let me rephrase this: It’s fine to start writing before you know what you want to say, but at some point in the writing process, you have to figure out what you want to say – and then you need to go back and rewrite/reshape your story so that it conveys most evocatively and effectively whatever theme/lesson/point you want to make.

How should the travel narrative be organized? It goes back to the cave-and-campfire scene where one of our adventurous ancestors was describing the hunt for a Gnarly Mastodon. Like that Stone Age storyteller, you should give your narrative a beginning, a middle and an end.

To my mind, these break down like this:

The beginning introduces the place where the story is set and suggests the writer’s quest or reason for being there. (To test this notion, I recently looked through the feature stories in the current issues of three prominent travel magazines. In every one, by the end of the fifth or sixth paragraph, the writer had given one sentence that clearly articulated the reason why he/she had come to that place: the quest.)

The middle reveals the writer’s experience through a series of scenes that are ordered chronologically or thematically. (Usually, it’s easier to arrange these chronologically, but sometimes for dramatic purposes, it makes more sense to organize them thematically. You want to make sure that your anecdotes ascend in power as the story progresses, so if your best anecdotes are from the beginning of the trip, you’ll probably not want to tell your tale chronologically.) These anecdotes/incidents/encounters are the critical stepping stones that led you – and so will lead your reader – to the illumination/point/resolution that inspired your story.

The end presents the resolution of the quest and ties the story back to the situation introduced at the beginning. In the best narratives, this creates a kind of closure that gracefully sends the reader back into the world, but enhanced now with the experience and lesson your story imparted.

So, here’s what you have to do:

  1. Figure out what the lesson of your travel experience/story is.
  2. Figure out what steps led you to learn that lesson.
  3. Recreate those steps in your mind.
  4. Recreate those steps in words so the reader can live them with you.
  5. Craft your tale with a beginning, middle and end that shape and convey your lesson.

Voila! Instant travel narrative. Just add wonder.

Of course, the truth is that success in travel writing is ultimately in the execution, not in the design. But at least having the right design can get you off to a great start. The rest is up to you: First of all, to travel deeply and secondly, to choose and evoke your travel experiences in a way that transports the reader with you.

In this way, every travel narrative is the process of at least two journeys – the journey in the world and the journey in the words.

Bon voyage!

[flickr images via merrah’s and woodleywonderworks]

The Creation of the Barbary Coast Trail in San Francisco

by David Farley on

Ask anyone with a budding interest in the Barbary Coast why there’s suddenly more attention being paid to the legendary neighborhood in recent years and they’ll point to one person. Meet Daniel Bacon. He’s a writer and historian who’s responsible for the creation of the Barbary Coast Trail San Francisco, a 3.8-mile zigzagging trail that takes trekkers through the heart and the periphery of the Barbary Coast. He also wrote the informative and entertaining “Walking San Francisco and the Barbary Coast Trail” as well as a pocket map and guide to the trail. I chatted with him recently about the neighborhood and the trail he created.

David Farley: How did you get interested in the Barbary Coast?
Daniel Bacon: I had an interest in San Francisco history in general. Especially from the Gold Rush to the 1906 earthquake and fire, and you can’t study that period and avoid the Barbary Coast waterfront. I found it all very intriguing. The reason I named the walking route the Barbary Coast Trail is that most of the trail relates to that period-a time when the heart of San Francisco’s port was referred to the Barbary Coast. It got that name because the original Barbary Coast was the coast of North Africa where there was an ethnic tribe called the Berbers. Like Somalia today, some of them were pirates and they would kidnap people and hold them for ransom. So during and after the Gold Rush sailors would abandon their ships in San Francisco to go searching for gold in the hills. Which meant ships needed crews badly. So captains would go to bordering houses to recruit. And the bordering houses boss, who would get a stake in recruiting crews, would often do it against people’s wills by knocking them out and giving them to the captain. By the time this unsuspecting person would come to, he’d find himself on a boat out in the sea and was shanghaied. So that’s why it became known as the Barbary Coast.
DF: It seems there’s been a resurgence in interest in the Barbary Coast over the last few years, right?

DB: There has been. And much of it has to do with the creation of the Barbary Coast Trail. The creation was sponsored by the San Francisco Historical Society. Then I ended up publishing the first guidebook to the Barbary Coast Trail. A number of years later, I created the audio guide. It has period music and sound effects and historical reenactments. It’s been a fun project. I continue working on it. We’re placing more medallions in the ground along the trail. There are 180 in the ground but we want to have 300 eventually.


DF: Each Barbary Coast Trail medallion is sponsored by someone. I recognized some names on a few of the medallions.

There family of Cliff Burton, the deceased Metallica bassist, sponsored one. So did Carlos Santana and his wife–for her father, an old musician. The San Francisco Giants have one and so does Senator Diane Fienstein.

DF: Where can one find the spirit of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco today?

DB: The spirit of the Barbary Coast has embedded itself into the DNA of the city. That’s why it attracted the beets in the ’50s and gays of ’60s and ’70s and so on. In the 19th century you could come here and be yourself and be who you want to be. And that still continues. Back in the day, the Barbary Coast was filled with brothels and there was a lot of sex and debauchery. But even up until World War II, Pacific Street, one of the main streets of the Barbary Coast, was so crazy that the military made it off limits. It was too wild. But what happened is that a lot of the businesses moved up to Broadway. Which is why today Broadway has a bunch of strip clubs. So that’s a remnant, for sure. And just the fact that San Francisco has attracted all these different groups who were outsiders in other parts of the country but here they found a home.

Will Christopher Robin’s bookshop be saved?

by Sean McLachlan on


A couple of days ago we reported that a bookshop once owned by the real Christopher Robin was closing.

The Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth, England, was opened in 1951 by Christopher Robin Milne, son of Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne. The author used his son as a character in his books. Christopher Robin died in 1996, and rising rents and a slump in sales are forcing the current owners to close in September.

Now the local paper Dartmouth Chronicle reports that people are rallying to save the shop. The Dartmouth and Kingswear Society, a heritage preservation group, is suggesting the bookshop be continued as a nonprofit community enterprise. Considering the shop’s historical significance, they might be able to get some government funding, although with the current fiscal situation that will be a tough fight.

TV personality Jonathan Dimbleby has also joined the growing call for the shop to be saved.

I hope they succeed. Independent bookshops are places for readers to mingle and discover titles they didn’t know they were looking for. They add character to their neighborhoods and can be a significant tourist draw, as The Harbour Bookshop was. I’ve seen way too many beloved bookshops close. New York City in the 1980s was filled with funky little independents, now mostly gone due to the Big Apple’s soaring rents. Here in Oxford, Waterfield’s closed. They still have an online presence but it’s not the same as popping in before a day’s work at the university. It’s been replaced by Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe. I wonder if the tourists who swarm in there realize this “Ye Olde Shoppe” is less than two years old!

It’s not just bookshops that are affected. Small businesses on English High Streets are dying and being replaced with chains, homogenizing and depersonalizing the places where people live and shop. Here’s hoping the campaigners can preserve some of Dartmouth’s character.

[Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons]