Seven Legs Across the Seas: A Printer's Impressions of Many Lands

Murray, Samuel, 1865-Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8
Word count
808K words
Chapters
81

Tags

English Originals Travel Human GeographyTravelogueWorld TravelSocial ObservationAdventure JourneyDocumentary NarrativeAutobiographical EssaysExotic CultureCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Seven Legs Across the Seas: A Printer's Impressions of Many Lands by Samuel MurrayAuthor: Murray, Samuel, 1865-,Language: English, Class: G: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation, Release Date: Nov 28, 2012

Editor's review

This book gathers the observations of a printer who traveled across seas and foreign lands. Its value lies not in grand narrative but in the granular realities afforded by a professional perspective: the author attends to ports, streets, print shops, and the traces of human labor in everyday work. He surveys local customs through a craftsman's eyes, in a plain style that does not strain for exotic spectacle, lending the late-nineteenth-century travelogue an uncommon commoner's air. For today's readers it serves both as a record of places seen and as peripheral material for the history of printing and of working-class life. Best dipped into on a commute or before sleep, it need not be read for narrative continuity; pause over a port or an anecdote and savor it. Those interested in the social details behind travel literature will find here an unobtrusive supplement.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read section by section according to location; after finishing each port or city, close the book and recall the most striking detail.
  2. Keep a map at hand to look up the place names the author mentions, enhancing the sense of space.
  3. The English original suits ten to twenty minutes of daily extensive reading; there is no need to look up every word.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
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  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
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  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
  74. 74
  75. 75
  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
  79. 79
  80. 80
  81. 81

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a travel notebook? Judging by its title and classification, it is a collection of observations written after the author traveled widely as a printer, not a work of fiction. It should be read as a personal record of observation rather than a narrative with continuous plot.
How difficult is the English? Is it suitable for English learners? The original was written in late-nineteenth-century English, with longer sentences and some vocabulary bearing the marks of its era, but it is chiefly observational writing rather than dense argument. Readers with some foundation in English can use it for extensive reading and need not insist on deciphering every obscure place name.
Why recommend it to readers interested in printing history? The author was himself a printer, and his attention to print shops, manual labor, and trade observations in various places is a dimension ordinary travelers tend to overlook. Such details offer firsthand peripheral material for the history of printing and of working-class life.

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About the author

Murray, Samuel, 1865- Author · 1865

Samuel Murray (born 1865) is an author about whom very little biographical information survives. Publicly available sources are limited, and no reliable record of his nationality, education or professional career has been found; his writing can therefore be approached only through his work itself. One title by him is held in the collection, Seven Legs Across the Seas: A Printer's Impressions of Many Lands. The title indicates a travel narrative, in which the author, a printer by trade, records his impressions and observations from voyages across the seas and travels through many countries. Travel writing by ordinary working people of this kind tends to focus on everyday details, local customs and the realities of life abroad rather than on grand historical narrative; the phrase "a printer's impressions" also suggests a distinctly professional perspective and personal observation. The book offers a concrete textual example for the study of travel writing and the lives of printing workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.