London: Macmillan and Co., 1901

12mo, pp. 245, 4pp. advertisements bound in at rear. Folded maps and illustrations tipped in throughout text. Original red boards, lettered in gilt to front panel and spine, blind-stamped design to front panel. Edges red. Endpapers a little browned, Tippex applied to small area of front pastedown. Map bound in at rear separating at fold, and missing a portion neatly excised with scissors, additional map portion taped in opposite p.123. Gilt a little dulled, wear to edges and spine ends.

E.M. FORSTER’S COPY, USED BY HIM WHILE TRAVELLING IN 1903, WITH HIS PENCILLED NOTES TO FRONT FREE ENDPAPER AND OCCASIONAL JOTTINGS TO THE TEXT.

E.M. Forster began to travel extensively around Europe between 1897 and 1901, while still an undergraduate at Kings College, Cambridge. On graduating, he and his mother embarked on a year-long trip to Italy, during which they stayed at the Pensione Simi in Florence, the hotel which would later become the Pensione Bertolini in A Room With a View (1908). Forster toured Italy once again in 1903, and this time added Greece to his itinerary: the Greek leg of the tour, and particularly a stay in Athens, was the inspiration behind Forster’s short story The Road from Colonus, first published in The Celestial Omnibus in 1911.

This guidebook, published only two years before the trip, accompanied Forster on his tour. His pencilled jottings to the book’s front free endpaper are a chronology of events in Greek history, providing Forster with a ready reference as he travelled: a three-digit number (the year) followed by the event. So we have ‘421 Peace of Nicias’, ‘427 Lesbos Taken’, ‘490 Marathon’, and so on. And the guidebook’s section on the sculptures in the Athens National Museum (p. 113) is liberally annotated by Forster in the margins (’earliest example of Pentelic marble’, etc.). In addition, the book’s maps have occasionally been customised, presumably by Forster himself, the better to aid his travels.