The other day I was walking through my local Barnes & Noble bookstore and saw something that made me realize I’m getting old. Or at least older. That’s what happens when something you used regularly in your childhood suddenly becomes a vintage/retro cool collectible.

Gear from the defunct airline Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) suddenly has the hip retro factor akin to the Cool Brittania phase of just a few years ago. Barnes & Noble is selling cards, notebooks, journals, and tote bags featuring Pan Am’s stark blue-and-white logo, and plenty of other sites are selling a new line of luggage featuring the airline’s graphics. I’ve even heard that Marc Jacobs, a high-end designer, has designed one of these bags.

One site peddling the gear had me laughing my head off this morning. “These bags remind us of a better day when air travel was elegant,” it says enthusiastically. Maybe. But I traveled Pan Am a number of times in the years just before it went bust, and while the world-shaped logo might remind others of days when you dressed up for flying, the same logo was slapped on the cramped, overcrowded, smelly flights my family took back and forth to the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s.

Seeing the Pan Am logo in my local bookstore, selling with all the hype of hip, did remind me of really awful airline food when you could still get it, but it also sent me back to those first heady days of living overseas when I was still a kid, when everything was absolutely fascinating and new and fresh and no matter how bad the transatlantic flight was, it was still the coolest thing on earth to be doing it. Sometimes we don’t know how lucky we are.

I’ve got a bug for old travel books recently. There was Jan Morris — not an old book, but with many older essays in it — and before her Wilfred Thesiger, who makes me wish I could have been an Englishman stationed in Arabia before the Brits and French went in and carved it all up to make weird new countries like Iraq and Iran and basically screw up the rest of the century. It would have been nice to see the land before borders were dropped at the whim of imperialists.

And now I’ve gone further back, to Afanasy Nikitin’s Voyage Beyond Three Seas. Although Nikitin wrote his book in the mid-1400s, my edition is an imaginatively illustrated hardback published in the Soviet Union, complete with request from Raduga Publishers for readers’ “opinion of this book, its translation and design and any suggestions you may have for future publications.” Forget being nostalgic about the world of exploration before the advent of “adventure travel,” that line made me nostalgic for a time when, supposedly, publishers actually cared about the quality and content of what they printed.

Nikitin was a merchant in the 15th century who set out from his native Tver (now located between Moscow and Petersburg) for the reported riches of India, and is supposedly the first Russian ever to have reached India. Evidently, according to the publishers, India and Russia have always had a special connection: “Since olden times the peoples of the two great countries have lived in friendship, showing a keen interest in each other.” Which might explain why the two countries consistently produce more genius mathematicians than the rest of the world combined.

As a travel book, Voyage Beyond Three Seas leaves a lot to be desired by modern standards. There is little dramatic element, and descriptions of vast lands zip by so fast that I had to pull out an atlas and a guide to old city/country names to figure out where in the heck Nikitin had landed this time. Taken in the context of its audience, likely other merchants looking to make the arduous journey across seas and mountains, its descriptive power was considerable: “And near Ceylon precious stones, rubies, rock crystal, agates, amber, beryls, and emery are found. … The harbour of Pegu is not small, and it is mostly Indian dervishes there.”

Your eyes could glaze over reading too much of that kind of listing, combined as it is with enumerations of various fighting forces and servants and retainers and elephants of various leaders and warlords. Like I said, little dramatic element. But reading between these lines, and paying attention, you realize that Nikitin suffered massive hardships in his endeavors to trade the riches of India with the riches of Russia. From being attached and plundered by “pagan Tartars” to becoming madly depressed over his “sinful” decision to give up his “true faith” of Russian Orthodoxy for Islam, you get the impression that Nikitin dragged himself over the seas and land by pure force of will, often hungry, always lonely and desperate to return to Russia, very often nearly losing his life. (Note: the conversion to Islam is unclear, but scholars studying the text have concluded that he very likely did, explaining why he constantly referred to his “sinful voyage.”)

Compare this with the over-hyped experiences of travel writers who throw themselves into possibly life-threatening situations (or at least physically endangering themselves) and then can’t wait to rush home and write about it. Lacking introspection as well as true observation, these books and articles have to hinge themselves on adventure travel because the days of true exploration are over, which, as I’ve mentioned before, can leave a sadder literary landscape.

With a background of a home they will assuredly return to, most travel writers who follow this path fail to reach the desperate pitch of a muted and untrained 15th-century resident lost and hungry in a foreign land, who dragged himself home mile by mile and died before making it back to his hometown. The irony is that, when true adventure was possible, it wasn’t held to be admirable or desirable. Further irony — it’s almost depressing to know that in 2006 an Indian organization retraced Nikitin’s journey … by driving in SUVs.

Nobody sold Nikitin a package tour to India, touting hobnobbing with natives, and the risks he took were not to alleviate a privileged white boy’s malaise, but to expand the glory of his home country and bring something of the outside world back.

Of course, it’s debatable whether real exploration or adventure travel is more desirable. The former very possibly does more damage than the latter, as adventure travel has a vested interest in preserving wilderness and culture. But the writing is another thing entirely. It’s hard to take seriously so much of our modern adventure travel, written as it is with so little knowledge and historical context, when compared with the adventurers and explorers of bygone ages, people with a thirst to learn about a reachable speck of foreign lands, not just the limits of their physical capabilities.

Following on Liz’s post about great bookstores worldwide, and on the seemingly collective obsession we PT bloggers have with books (especially, of course, those related to travel), I’m happy to be able to point readers in the direction of an article on ABEBooks that combines travel and booklust.

I’m always happy to tout ABE anyway, since you can find almost any book on the planet on it and support over 13,000 independent booksellers at the same time. But if you’re a lover of old travel guides you’ll really want to read an article they’ve posted about collecting rare, antique, or simply old out-of-print travel guides. Not only does it give fun little snippets from the humble beginnings of Fodor’s and Frommer’s, and snippy responses to Baedeker’s like “guidebooks for the common American,” it also gives links to some of the most collectible (and expensive) old travel guides around. I like the Baedeker with a Biedermeier cover for $4400, but real treats are the Emigrant guides that were published for farmers and pioneers and gold diggers (of both varieties) looking to settle in the American West. You could pay over $500 for a guide to the “backwoods and prairie,” also known as the Western States. Tempting, but I bet my ancestors didn’t pay that much for it when settling a Montana homestead in the 1880s.

There is an attraction in old travel guides. Something about the language or lyricism or simply the enjoyment of a world that, pre-Internet and cheap air travel, was more mysterious and fascinating viewed from the comfy perspective of those secure in their country’s preeminence. Personally, I like ones that are even harder to find, written by natives with a love for their city of culture. I’ve got a few: a Soviet-era publication called “Around the Golden Ring of Russia,” whose elegant language reminds me of the kind of letters written by my great-grandmother; Henriette Mandl’s “In Search of Vienna: Walking Tours of the City;” and “Florence:an appreciation of her beauty,” a 1960 guide by then-mayor of the city Piero Bargellini, complete with colored plates and a foldout map.

Using old guides to traverse a place is a unique experience. Compare traveling through Italy guided by an old Baedeker with doing the same with a modern Let’s Go or Lonely Planet — by switching volumes you could be in an entirely different country without moving a step.

I wanted to make this PT’s Jan Morris week, not that it necessarily coincides with anything particular about her, like her birthday. The past couple weeks have zipped by without my noticing, so I’ll just celebrate Jan Morris when and how I can.

I’ve been slowly reading through her book A Writer’s World: Travels 1950-2000 since I left for Rome last month and am daily heartened and amazed at the quality and quantity of work and thought this writer has put in over the last 50-some years.

Reading Jan Morris is like being on an eclectic, elegant holiday where the food is fantastic, light, flavorful, spicy, sweet, sometimes decadent, served in small portions, and the taste is always akin to a minor religious experience.

As described, A Writer’s World starts out in the 1950s, when Jan was James and in one of the first major published essays was on Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary and a frozen beard. Morris’s sex change in the 1970s plays a very tiny role in this book, the operation being written about cautiously as part of an essay on Casablanca.

It’s fascinating to read the evolution of the author. In the earlier essays, Morris’s language is always effusive and enthusiastic. “Only the city of (La Paz / Rome / Cairo / etc.) could put together such (pizzazz / modernity / effervessence / etc.” occurs constantly, and I think every single essay about Africa includes the word “fizz.” Morris was always a great writer, but matures through the 70s and 80s, writing lengthy essays on Manhatten and South African apartheid that are intelligent, prescient, and strongly supported as well as strongly opinioned.

Morris’s writing has been described as idiosyncratic, but I think it’s more than that. Somehow she invariably puts her finger on the truth of a place, what makes the heart of it, the soul. What makes places tick and move and live. Even Colin Thubron, my favorite travel writer, doesn’t usually venture the bald commentaries Morris makes. Morris isn’t afraid to say what she thinks, what she sees, and particularly what she thinks about what she sees. This combined with the talents of a great travel writer is a rare thing.

Do women get something more out of traveling without the boys? The girls over at Chickable think so. They argue that women traveling together naturally produce an atmosphere (and even, individually, stress-fighting hormones) that reduce stress and provide a healing environment.

I can sense you all jumping all over this proposition. I hear you. I’ve worked at fashion magazines where the staff was all women and the bitchiness and cat-fighting was monumental.

But Chickable isn’t claiming any and all women are good to travel with, just that traveling with a group of great girlfriends is a fulfilling travel experience all women should have, which is why they’ve set up a network and travel resource site for women. I should point out that the site isn’t just for chick groups, but is set up as a resource for women traveling without their significant others (I’m assuming this just means male spouses and partners), which in our extroverted world often means women traveling in a group together.

For me, I’d need a bit more convincing. I’m a loner, an introvert — my phalanx of ‘girlfriends’ involves three or four people, all of whom live in different countries. And I hate the beach. On the other hand, I have been in groups of women where what’s loosely termed ‘energy’ was gentle and lovely, the best that women can bring out of themselves. Does having a man around change this? Often. So if I were the sort of chick who was desperate to hang out with other like-minded chicks, away from my husband and son, I might be tempted to join a chick travel network.

I might. It’s hard to imagine oneself as a different person, in this case one who’s desperate to hang out with a group of people. Somehow I sense there’s a lot of introverts in our readers, too. What do you think?

As for traveling by myself, I do that enough anyway. And my husband has learned by now that, when we’re traveling together, my dumping him for a couple hours so I can tramp around on my own doesn’t mean I don’t love him.