What to do with a 130-year-old book by an author few have spoken of since his work left the booksellers' stalls: If you're some kind of artist, you cut out the engravings and paste them into a collage. If you're a collector, you leaf through to judge the book's condition, but don't dare molest it afterwards. If you're like me, you devour it.

I have gagged on the content of old, forgotten books by uncanonized authors, but more often I have savored it. For this I thank my wife. Before we were married, she would go up to visit her parents in Vermont and I would stay behind. She would return with stacks of old books for me, which she bought cheap at an antiques collective in Quechee. I don't know what she expected me to do with them--perhaps salt my shelves with them for decorative effect--but she was surprised, by and by, to find that I read every one.

There are such treasures as A Little Book of Tribune Verse: A Number of Hithero Uncollected Poems , Grave and Gay (Grosset & Dunlap, 1901), some of which we reprinted in Alicubi, and A Laugh a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, by Irvin S. Cobb, a 1923 joke book that contains, among others, two jokes on the topic of "art," five on "Americans abroad," nine on "dining," twelve on Irishmen, and exactly 49 "Negro" jokes.

By far the most beautiful volume is Charles Carleton Coffin's page-turner, Our New Way Round the World.

Steam power--the steam ship, the locomotive, the steam shovel--is changing Coffin's world, opening the Near East and the Orient to unprecedented communication and trade with the West. A Pacific crossing takes only four weeks. The Suez Canal is being dug at a rate of 2,700,000 cubic yards per month, and is expected to be finished shortly after the book goes to press. Steam power has opened these faraway lands not only to traders and armies, but also to American tourists. Coffin's chief object is to enlighten those of lesser means, but he also aims to provide the well-to-do tourist an account of what he might encounter on a trip around the world.

Coffin made his name as a reporter for the Boston Journal on the battlefields of the Civil War. After the war, the Journal sent him to cover a conflict which threatened to inflame all of Europe--the tiff between the Hapsburg empire and the Prussians. That fizzled out before he arrived, so he found himself in Liverpool with his wife and baggage and nothing to do. His editor instructed him then to continue eastward, circumnavigating the globe. Coffin did, and sent weekly letters to the paper.

Far be it from a 19th-century white man to embrace cultural relativism: Coffin's opinions of the world's people are Protestant American. Nevertheless, he comes down hard on only one ethnic group among all the savages in his path: the Arabs.

His complaint has nothing to do with religion or feminism. In fact, he seems fascinated and duly impressed with their religious observances, offering this lovely description of "Ramazan" in Cairo:

The men are capable of great endurance. They will run all day at a mule's pace, without food or drink. During Ramazan they are not allowed by the Koran to take any nourishment between sunrise and sunset. To draw a whiff from a pipe even would entail loss of paradise.

Some minutes before the close of the day, during Ramazan, every man fills his pipe, and waits with listening ears to hear the boom of the cannon upon the fortress, which is fired the moment the sun disappears beneath the horizon. Thousands of matches are lighted in an instant, and ten thousands of pipes are brought into use. A cloud of tobacco-smoke suddenly gathers over the great city.

Coffin's is the same beef that writers from Twain to Bowles have had with the Arabs. He despises their clamoring for baksheesh, which he takes for shiftlessness, and thinks they're a bunch of shysters to boot: "These men are sharper than any Yankee at a bargain. The keenest Vermonter would be outwitted and fleeced by them. It is easier for them to lie than to tell the truth."

Not that he thinks his own people are much better, however: "Travelers are usually severe in their denunciations of the Arabs, who beg unblushingly, and cheat in petty ways at every opportunity...but for swindling, fraud, and robbery there are no Bedouins of the desert that equal the hackmen and stock-jobbers of New York."

Coffin hasn't the wit that Twain has in his travel writing, and his opinions, which he gives freely amid much lush description, extensive historical background, and astute political and economic analysis, might have been tedious at the time; but burnished by well over a century, they can be delightful. Travelling by stage across the American West on the last leg of his journey, he visits Brigham Young's settlement on the Great Salt Lake: "There is nothing in democracy any more than in autocracy to grow such an excrescence as that of Utah. It is flourishing now, but slavery has disappeared from the land, and the time is not too far distant when the country will be purged of polygamy--by peaceful means if possible, by forcible if there is no other way."

The strongest positions Coffin takes are on religion. He sees the devil behind Mormonism, regards Chinese ancestor worship as craziness, but admires the "Hindoo" faith because it calls for cleanliness. He has his own religious reverie while visiting the Yosemite Valley.

Coffin's politics couldn't be simpler: The United States of America is the epitome of liberty and justice, and the rest of the world would do well to follow her example. His patriotism reaches a fever pitch in another book he wrote some years later: The Boys of '76, a stirring account of America's war of independence. That one I picked up while visiting Vermont recently. It's a must-read for all American Revolution buffs, as I will admit to being. I had my mother make me a replica of General Washington's uniform, complete with tri-corner hat, wig, and spats when I was six or seven years old. I would wear it around the house, fantasize about marching in the ranks of the Continental Army, and pretend to sign the Declaration of Independence on fake parchment with a real quill pen. I was every parent's dream: Please mom, can't we go to the National Archives? Oh, won't you take me to Mount Vernon?

The Boys of '76 revived my fascination. And to live in Brooklyn, where General Howe with 30,000 red coats and Hessians routed the Yankee rebels! That the blood of patriots flowed down Court Street and the Gowanus, right in my back yard!

The next Coffin book on my list is My Days and Nights on the Battle-field, his memoirs of the Civil War. I doubt it will disappoint.

--Martin F. Downs