As a collector of, and dealer in, the niche market of travel books, I’m always on the lookout for rare and unusual travel books. Many years ago, I read about a special travel book that was not in any way a travel guide.  A Travel Book, written and illustrated by American artist, educator, and arts administrator Fred Martin and printed in 1976 under the direction of Andrew Hoyem at his Arion Press in San Francisco, was issued  in an edition of just 200. My search for the book only turned up copies in museum collections, so I basically forgot about it. This week, I ran across a reference to the book and also found a copy for sale, but didn’t make the purchase after all as it was over priced.

Nevertheless, I still find A Travel Book to have an intriguing backstory. The author and illustrator Fred Martin, who was retiring after a long career at the San Francisco Art Institute, rewrote the notes he had made during a 1971 round-the-world trip and created 42 color linocuts based on his watercolor designs for this publication that was printed in handset Inkunabula type, designed by Raffaello Bertieri in 1921 for the Nebiolo type foundry, on specially-made cotton paper by the Curtis Paper Company. The binding is by Susan Spring Wilson with a silkscreened-printed cloth design by Martin.

Martin wrote in the exhibition catalog Four Decades that he “thought it would be great to take the 1971 text, revise it into an almost mythological story and to develop illustrations to fit.” For the project, he studied medieval and Islamic illuminated manuscripts and drew inspiration from “everything from Jung to Avicenna, from my mystical geometry to Byzantine art to Islamic calligraphy.”