With Christmas approaching, travel books make perfect gifts for aspiring adventurers. Exploring the latest bestsellers is one approach.

This year’s top reads include Monisha Rajesh’s ‘Epic Train Journeys’; ‘Winter Pasture’, Li Juan’s tale of life with Kazakh herders; and Tom Chesshyre’s ‘Park Life: Around the World in 50 Parks’.

Alternatively, explore antiquarian booksellers for inspiring classic travel reads and the intoxicating bibliosmia of well-thumbed pages imbued with adventure. Here are some of my favourites, with no apology that several tales are from decades ago. They’re all worth the effort of tracking down a copy.

On foot across Europe

With various travel modes in mind, we start on foot with John Hillaby’s 1974 walking classic, ‘Journey Through Europe’. Then there’s F. S. Smythe’s 1934 ‘An Alpine Journey’, about the author’s ski-mountaineering trip across Switzerland. You know a Swissophile? They’ll love it.

From a year before Smythe’s book, and now on four legs, Aimé Félix Tschiffely’s horseback trek from Argentina to New York (‘Tschiffely’s Ride’) documents a venture contemporaneously described as ‘Impossible! Absurd!’ by the press. Saddle up for a wonderful read.

New York’s Floyd Bennett Field was the start and finish for Post and Gatty’s record-breaking 1931 airborne circumnavigation, as recounted in ‘Around the World in Eight Days’. What an adventure it was in their tiny single-engine Lockheed Model 5C Vega named ‘Winnie Mae’.

Oh how aviation has changed since then. Check out airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker’s exquisite writing in 2015’s ‘Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot’. You’ll never experience air travel the same way again. It’s an enchanting book.

More than just a great travel book

I was torn between several favourites for my marine recommendation. Ultimately, eschewing gripping blue-water tales such as Rosie Swale’s ‘Children of Cape Horn’ or Captain Edward L. Beach’s ‘Around the World Submerged’, I chose Merlin Minshall’s tale of crossing Europe in ‘Sperwer’, a Dutch sailing barge.

More than just a great travel book, ‘Guilt Edged’ quickly becomes a gripping spy thriller when the Gestapo take an interest in the trip… Minshall later made the first motorcycle crossing of the Sahara. Though impressive, that is a short drive compared with the epic London to Singapore Land Rover adventure in Tim Slessor’s ‘First Overland’. It was the first travel book I read and remains a favourite.

Whether you enjoy these titles or the latest travel books, look forward to some serious inspiration for 2022’s adventures. Here’s wishing you a seasonal bon voyage, wherever the pages take you!