Travel books are not a profitable form of writing; their sale is usually small but they have for the author the satisfaction of possessing reference value. They hold their place on library shelves and are consulted by the student and the traveller long after novels that enjoyed a brief bright summer are utterly forgotten, I do not suppose that it would pay a publisher to reissue today Froude's English in the West Indies, Treves's Cradle of the Deep, or Rutter's If Crab No Walk, but those three books provide indispensable research material. It is of value to learn how certain places struck people twenty, fifty, eighty years ago.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Travel books are not a profitable form of writing; their sale is usually small but they have for the author the satisfaction of possessing reference value. They hold their place on library shelves and are consulted by the student and the traveller long after novels that enjoyed a brief bright summer are utterly forgotten, I do not suppose that it would pay a publisher to reissue today Froude's English in the West Indies, Treves's Cradle of the Deep, or Rutter's If Crab No Walk, but those three books provide indispensable research material. It is of value to learn how certain places struck people twenty, fifty, eighty years ago." in the context of "(2011), The Sugar Islands: A Collection of Pieces Written About the West Indies Between 1928 and 1953 chapter: Foreword, publisher: A&C Black, ISBN: 1448202485 (2nd edition, Cassell & Company, 1958; (1949), The Sugar Islands: A Caribbean Travelogue (1st ed.) publisher: Farrar, Straus & Company)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.