How to make a travelling sauna
Reader - Gregory
Spider - Margo
Questions - Nico
MAY - 2021

Subtitle: 'Culture of Steam, Steam across Culture, The Travelling Steam'
Author: mainly one author who acknowledges a lot of authors. He is a traveller who has been working with NatGeo for a long time. G does not know him. The editor/publisher is Penguin Books. It is not a co-edition. It is a best-seller. The drawing is one of many sketches in the notebook of the author. This one is about a sauna that was in the valley in Switzerland. One sauna that he was trying to make mobile. It inaugrates the collections of travelling and craft.

The connection with CoV is that the book was inspires CoV. It's about moving between territories. Terriroty is not just a location, it is considering the relation between terriroties. And rurality and creativity. We think differently about a sauna that travels. It's one of the important books that inspires us to rethink rurality.

It lives in the travel shelf of the library. Or sometimes in the shelf of craft. It's not so much a how-to, it's more a non fiction novel about meeting culutres, mysticism, religion, travelling, gathering in the sauna, it is journalistic anthropology. It does talk about how to make a sauna.

12 eur

It's for people who read the New Yorker, who like to read long non fiction story. Who are interested about travels and other countries but don't want to have a colonial gaze on the other. It's a tradition which we have in France, see also Chris Marker, thinking about the voyager differently.

It was funded simply, the author who is a nomadic traveller. He tries to work with community and working on the side, and he wrote this on the side. It was 99% ready and he sent it to a few people and had a good network of peers. He found the publisher within 3 years. It was an easy process.

The book is first of all, a book that was a set of notes on paper, mixed with drawings. Then from that it has been transferred to the book. You always have a mix of drawings and words. It was important for him to have good feedback from those who live where he travelled to.

Format is hardcover. A pocket soon. 200pages. B&W. Easy.

The typography is one of the usual set of penguin fonts. It has a serif, a rarefied version of Times New Roman.

It has been sold more than 100,000 copies around the world. We are in the third reprint now.

The proofreading was done by Penguin staff. This guy is a little old and a bit of a womaniser. He meets young women who become his partner for one or two years, and sometimes she helps with this. She is not mentioned and it's a bit exploitative.

The thanks are to people he met in villages around the world. He refers to important journalists and voyagers who gave him advice about how to write the text.

Jamie doesn't like the book. For him it was a 10 page pamphlet. With a blue cover. He was surprised that it was published by Penguin but he is glad that they gave in.