The travelling library Blood, sweat, gun oil, dust and ashes

When one set out from home by steamship, expecting to be away a year or more, with no limit on baggage, travelling into the unknown — in Roosevelt’s case, at least — one tended to err on the side of caution and take not just one of everything, but back-ups as well. Roosevelt was a prodigious reader, a man who studied anything and everything. The prospect of finding himself bookless in a savage and illiterate land was horrifying, so it’s not surprising that one entire trunk was given over to what became known to history as the “Pigskin Library.”

This collection contained 59 volumes, all bound in pigskin for durability. “They’re meant for reading,” Roosevelt growled, and read they were. In , he noted that he always had a book with him, in his saddlebags or cartridge box, and would sit reading wherever he