Miss Cayley's adventures

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Marco Polo

Join the 13th century merchants Marco, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo as they journey from their native city of Venice to the faraway land of Cathay, or China. There, young Marco will meet Kublai Khan, the ruler of the vast Mongolian empire. Read about his many adventures serving the Khan in the lands East of Europe, and his adventures coming back home to Venice. This medieval book, dictated by Marco while imprisoned in Genoa, was one of the inspirations of the Age of Exploration during the Renaissance, and it still intrigues readers today to learn of the Polo's adventures in the far East.

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Fred Kaplan

Henry James was not only a great Victorian novelist. He was also one of the great travel writers of all time. Traveling in Italy with Henry James combines his vivid letters home from Italy with a selection of his most heartfelt and eloquent essays about the cities and rural areas he visited between 1869 and 1907. First arriving in Italy a year before it was united as a secular state, James was a firsthand observer of Italy's national adolescence and early adulthood. His letters bear witness to his spontaneous responses to the dramatic geography and the extroverted people, which were a refreshing contrast to the rainy climate and reserved Victorians he was accustomed to. In the essays James delves more deeply into his Italian experience. Unlike other collections of Henry James's Italian travel writing, Kaplan's anthology has been arranged geographically: He compiles for readers and tourists a literary map of James's Italy. This small, portable volume is the ideal companion for any explorer of Italy, and for the armchair tourist, Kaplan's collection provides a city-by-city tour of Florence, Venice, Rome, and the breathtaking countryside in between. In James's prose writings on Italy, readers will find the sensuous, passionate, human side of one of the most inspired writers in the English language.

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D. Cubitt, A.L. Mackley, and R.G. Wilson

Eighty-one letters written by and to John Patteson while he toured Europe from 1778-1779. Most of the correspondence was with his mother, Martha.

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Robert Louis Stevenson

KIDNAPPED is an adventure story that has become the model for any thriller of escape and suspense. Set in 1751, the flight of David Balfour and Alan Breck across the Highlands of Scotland is based on real events. Though he wrote the book to make money, while living as an invalid in Bournemouth. Stevenson was proud of it; he inscribed a presentation copy with the couplet. Here is the one sound page of all my writing. The one I'm proud of and that I delight in. Rowland Hilder is famous for his paintings of the English countryside but his work in book illustration covered a much wider canvas. His drawing for KIDNAPPED were first published in 1930 and have undeservedly, been long out of print. A sixteen-year-old orphan is kidnapped by his villainous uncle, but later escapes and becomes involved in the struggle of the Scottish highlanders against English rule.