Vintage travelogues, explorers, etc.

My books are mostly non-fiction, great vintage travelogues and naturalists of the first half of the century. Books written prior to 1960. A few favorites are Freya Stark, Vivenne de Watteville, William Beebe, John Muir, Eugenie Clark, etc. I find more contemporary travelogues to be pretentious and self-referential, excluding a few authors like Bruce Chatwin, Lawrence Millman, Jonathan Raban, Loren Eiseley. Would love to connect with similar readers and get more suggestions for books and authors from 1920-1955. Discovering those authors is very exciting to me!

There's a group for Antiquarian Travel Memoirs. It's not terribly active, but you might try giving it a boost! Or check out the Travel and Exploration Literature group. And a group for Naturalists (also in need of a nudge).

We had a "Travel writing and travelogues" theme in Reading Globally in 2014: http://www.librarything.com/topic/171762 - you might find some ideas there.

I read a lot of "old travel books", but when I come to look at them there aren't many that fall into your 1920-1955 window: apart from really obvious stuff like TE Lawrence and Robert Byron, most seem to be either from the 60s or pre-WWI. A tag mash for "travel, 1930s" http://www.librarything.com/tag/1930s,+travel predictably comes up with Paddy Leigh Fermor, J.B. Priestley, Laurie Lee, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and Beryl Markham.

If you do 1920s it's much the same, but you also get a lot of Hemingway and some of D.H. Lawrence's travel writing, which can be worth a look. http://www.librarything.com/tag/1920s,+travel

Do you know about Nicolas Bouvier's The way of the world? He was a wonderfully modest and low-impact Swiss writer who is just a touch too late for your rules, but maybe you could stretch a point for him...?

I see you read Ann Davison - do you know about Winifred Brown, who had the misfortune to be called "England's No.1 Adventure Girl" by the press of the day?

You might enjoy Mission to Tashkent. Paul Theroux's The Tau of Travel: Enlightenments From Lives on the Road lists a number of his favorite vintage travel books.

>1 SusanTahiti: You would be very welcome in the Tattered but still Lovely group. We love those older books too, and the superior writing. We've even got an old thread on traveling the world: http://www.librarything.com/topic/138640

I do not get how library thing works, just got this message. Will check out your suggestion!

Did not get thos message, don't understand how this works, thanks for the connection!

>6 SusanTahiti: What don't you get? There are no notifications that your message has had a reply, you just have to check back from time to time.

Hitting reply just sends your answer to the bottom of the topic. If you type > and the message number you get a link and the name of the poster.

Like this >7 SusanTahiti:

And you can customize the threads that you see. On the left column you can choose "Your posts" to show only the threads you've posted in. "All threads" is just TMI.

501 Must-Read Books lists forty titles in its section devoted to Travel, including the following titles from pre-1960:

The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London
Eothen by Alexander William Kinglake
From Southern Cross to Pole Star by A. F. Tschiffely
Golden Earth: Travels in Burma by Norman Lewis
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile by John Hanning Speke
Journey to the Hebrides by Samuel Johnson (and its companion by Boswell)
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft by Thor Heyerdahl
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West by Francis Parkman
My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Néel
The Purple Land by W. H. Hudson
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
A Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain
The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Travels of Ibn Battutah by Ibn Battutah
The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennas by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels by Freya Stark
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

I've not read many of these but can vouch for Kon-Tiki, Sailing Alone, and A Tramp Abroad as worthwhile. I especially liked the Johnson/Boswell tour of the Hebrides, where you can read Johnson's dry account first and then Boswell's account, which is almost more about Johnson than it is about the trip. The Darwin book was not to my taste and I had to choke it down, but friends have enjoyed it.

Seven Years in Tibet was great!