Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

I found this small leather-bound volume at a used bookstore years ago. It cost a dollar. I love the title and the fact that a previous owner had taken the time to have his or her own initials embossed on the cover. It emerged yesterday from a hidden place on a shelf while we were culling books. I’m not quite ready to let this one go.

Compiled by prolific British essayist E. V. Lucas, it was first published in 1899 and must have been popular. My copy notes it is the 27th edition, published in 1918, so it must have flown off the shelves. Either that or the print runs were tiny.

The book is meant for travelers, Lucas notes in his introduction.

This little book aims at nothing but providing companionship on the road for city-dwellers who take holiday. It has no claims to completeness of any kind: It is just a garland of good or enkindling poetry and prose fitted to urge folk into the open air, and, once there, to keep them glad they came–to slip easily from the pocket beneath the tree or among the heather and provide lazy reading for the time of rest with perhaps a phrase or two for the feet to step to and the mind to brood on when the rest is over.

Today our smart phones keep us company when we travel. But I like this little book, small enough to fit in a pocket as the author notes.

It’s a sweet compendium and suggests to me that even 126 years back, people may have had short attention spans. All the writing is brief.

Here are a few lines from a poem celebrating a boy riding a bike:

Swifter and yet more swift, Till the heart, with a mighty lift, Makes the lungs laugh, the throat cry “O bird, see; see, bird, I fly!“

I’m putting it in my travel bag, where I hope to forget about it until I’m on the road again and searching for something at the boarding gate. The surprise of it part of the pleasure for the next time I “take holiday.”