“The Traveller’s Handbook” (1981)
Recently, I found myself stuck waiting on a chartered bus which was running a little behind for the next adventure. The chairs in the lobby were uncomfortable and set me to pacing about, so I guess I ended up exploring the building more as a way to kill time than out of any real curiosity about the place. Up on the third floor, after slipping past a set of tensile barriers in order to have a peek at a closed-off area, I stumbled across an unused sitting room complete with a dusty pool table and cloth-covered furniture. A tall set of bookshelves lined the walls, the rows of English-language titles serving as artifacts which bore testimony to the volume of expatriates who’d traveled through the space in decades past. Their…