For Christmas, I got a copy of The Week-end Book. It’s a sort of best-of collection of material from previous editions of the Week-end Book, an anthology produced in many versions during the 1920s and 30s, which had a peculiar ambition: to be the ideal book for someone to bring along while traveling, or to read over a weekend at someone else’s house.

Accordingly, it contains an assortment of mostly very short readings: poetry (much of it humorous), songs (sometimes ditto), rules for games you might play at a house party. There is also reference material, of an odd kind: first aid hints of a dubious nature (eat six bitter almonds before a night out to avoid drunkenness), instructions on how to read weather maps, musical transcriptions of bird song, a discussion of the evolution of the English landscape, drawings of common English countryside flowers, measurement conversions involving improbable units.

It also contains some really quite good writing. Whether or not the material there is accurate these days, the section called “The Green and Pleasant Land” is melodiously written, and interesting as well.

It’s also an interesting concept, this idea of having a reader for traveling. Most travel guidebooks (there are a few exceptions) do not make an attempt to be continuously readable in any sense; you’re supposed to look things up in them, not read them curiously on the train. This is just the opposite, and should you ever find a train that will take you to the English countryside ca. 1929, you’ll be all set.