Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes — R. L. Stevenson, Folio Society

In September 1878 a young Scotsman set off into the Cévennes with a donkey he had just bought for sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy. He had no real idea what he was doing. Modestine would not walk at the pace he wanted, the pack kept sliding off her back, and it took him several days and the advice of an exasperated innkeeper before he worked out that she needed a goad rather than encouragement. Twelve days and a hundred and twenty miles later, he sold her and wept.

Robert Louis Stevenson was twenty-seven, unpublished in any serious sense, and in love with Fanny Osbourne — an American woman, ten years older, married, and by then back in California. He walked partly to think and partly to have something to write that might make him money and prove to his father he was not a wastrel. What came out of it was one of the first books to treat walking and sleeping out of doors as a pleasure rather than a hardship. He had a sleeping sack made to his own design for the journey, which makes him more or less the inventor of the sleeping bag.

It is a funnier book than its reputation suggests. Stevenson is honest about being bad at this, about the donkey getting the better of him, about the monks at Our Lady of the Snows trying to convert him over supper. And then, without warning, he writes a passage about waking at night under the pines that is as good as anything he ever did.

The Folio Society edition of 1967, first printing, with drawings by Edward Ardizzone — frontispiece and vignettes throughout, and a wraparound illustration of Stevenson hauling at Modestine on a hillside printed straight onto the cloth. Olive green lithographed cloth, gilt lettering to the spine, orange endpapers and orange top edge. 136 pages, with the original green slipcase.

Condition: Very good. The boards are clean with the illustration crisp, the binding tight and square, the gilt bright, and the pages clean throughout with no inscriptions. There is some fading to the spine, which is common to this edition and is not visible when the book is shelved in its slipcase. The slipcase is sound and unsplit.

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