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Buy the large format Paperback  @ £15/$20   ​
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pdf ISBN: 978-1-911193-60-9
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version: bookmarked pdf
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Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: July 2019
Format: Paperback  ~  Extent: 144pp.  ~  Size: 20.3 x 24.1 cm
List Price: £15.00/$20 
Print ISBN: 978-1-911193-59-3
Tags: drift, dérive, pilgrimage, mythogeography, walking, phil smith, john schott, tony whitehead
Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage
John Schott  ~  Phil Smith  ~  Tony Whitehead  

Readership

Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage is a book for walkers, artists who use walking in their art, students who are discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking, anyone troubled by official guides to anywhere, psychogeographers, site-specific performers and urban explorers.​

Reviews

“I love this book. Text and photos interrelate in intriguing ways, inviting me to slow down, be present, see and imagine. The photographs give everyday spaces and landscapes a detailed structural beauty, helping me see what I tend not to see. The words bring beauty and specificity of detail to my mind's eye. The feelings and emotions I experience in being present to this virtual reality are no less real than if I were actually standing in that reality.”
Carol Donelan, Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota

"This is a very singular book, a type of choose-your-own-adventure except with no choices (but plenty of meditative exercises). It follows a walk the authors made—through town and country, historic buildings and religious sites, and even at one point under the sea—and splits that journey across 19 days (ideally to be read one per day). Each day is a page or two of writing (usually visiting just one or two sites) plus some spectacular photographs to help ground you in the place. Within the texts are many prompts to stop and think, to consider the history and deeper meaning of the place, and to place yourself within the surrounding world. I've never read anything quite like it, and I'm not sure anything quite like it exists."
Dan Sumption on Goodreads

"The cover of this book alone might well draw in a reader attuned to numinous sites. The hill depicted will likely strike an echo with readers of Arthur Machen – surely it was somewhere like this to which Machen was drawn in The Hill of Dreams.

...from page to page the reader is presented with scenarios that may be a kind of path of initiation – confronted with an unfamiliar place or environment, how will you react? With imagination, or rejection, or indifference?

...the compilers ...offer ...a constellation of images by John Schott from which the two writers extract confrontations with meaning, often heightening the unheimlich, or unsettling, potential inherent within certain places and encounters....

This mind-pilgrimage is both rural and urban, sacred and neglected, involving the kind of places which if allowed can coax the consciousness into insight."

Reviewed in Northern Earth, Issue 159, 2019. Visit Northern Earth magazine

"Here the mundane becomes wonderful and unsuspected treasures are unearthed beneath your nose." Read the full review
Dr Anne E Bailey, Faculty of History, University of Oxford was:
​
"...enchanted and completely drawn in! I loved the blend of mindfulness and secular mysticism. Reading some of the book's descriptions I was reminded of TS Eliot, but I think it most strongly reminded me of Paulo Coelho's 'The Pilgrimage'...
 
The book nicely captures the conflicting emotions that many British people have for familiar landscapes and history of their country. I like (and agree with) the suggestion that we've now moved on from the idealised Romantic views to something more complex and 'uneven'. 

It seems to me that there's much in the book which the 'spiritual but not religious' members of today's post-secular society would find appealing, such as the observation that localised truths and beliefs run in 'parallel' to 'official' ones and the notion of the interconnectedness of all things, places, and times. 

Lastly, it seems to me that a great strength of the book is that it avoids sentimentality and a kind of Romantic yearning for a lost past or English idyll. The past may lie around in ruins in the book (as it often seems to!) but at the same time it's a real - and realistic – part of the present and not to be judged or mourned for. "

"It is wonderful - a brilliant idea, beautifully done, with a sweetly companionable tone to the writing." 
Jay Griffiths (writer/broadcaster/author of Pip Pip & Wild)

 BELOW: Philip Carr-Gomm, leader of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, talks about the Guidebook:

Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage

Phil Smith & Tony Whitehead (text) ~ John Schott (photography) 

Phil Smith (Crabman/Mythogeography) and Tony Whitehead (Birdman) join forces with master photographer John Schott to lead readers on a ‘virtual’ journey to explore difference and change on their way to an unknown destination. “What is most real is what you have still to discover.”

“Relax in your seat. Allow the train to take you along the water’s edge to the beginning point of your walking pilgrimage… When the train pulls into the platform, step off. Hidden behind the platform is a broken machine; a mechanised fortune teller – the ‘voice of truth’ – discarded from the nearby arcade of slot machines. Propped against the side of a building, its mouth is silent, its pronouncements have ceased; any truths you find today will be your own.”
 
Pilgrimages – real and imagined - are always popular, sometimes compulsory. Bodh Gaya, Santiago, Mecca, Jerusalem, Puri: a few of the sites that beckon. The pilgrimage to the authentic self takes a similar path in an interior landscape. In the 15th century, Felix Fabri combined the two, using his visits to Jerusalem to write a handbook for nuns wanting to make a pilgrimage in the imagination, whilst confined to their religious houses.
 
For Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage, the authors followed Fabri’s example: first walking together over many weeks – not to reach a destination but simply to find one – then, in startling words and images, conjuring an armchair pilgrimage for the reader… along lanes and around hills, into caves and down to the coast. “We arrived again and again at what we assumed would be a final ‘shrine’, only to be drawn onwards and inwards towards another kind of finality… rather than reaching a destination, the pilgrimage was repeatedly reborn inside us, until its most recent rebirth in this book.”
 
Over the course of the 19-day Armchair Pilgrimage, they invite us to experience the world around us just as they did as they walked. So, over the first three days, they suggest that we contemplate, among other things:

  • Our habit of generalising – acquired 40-50,000 years ago, when our ‘chapel’ mind of specialisms became a ‘cathedral’ mind
  • Our tendency to let one thing remind us of another thing
  • What it might be like to be an ocean where fish swim through us
  • How the world experiences us just as we experience it: ‘gently feel for the feelers feeling for you’
  • A world where we tend to ‘add’ meaning and intensity
  • A world where we let go (without the aid of dementia) of memory, imagination, desire and wild fancy.
 
And, as the pilgrimage concludes: “Returning is never going back to the same place.”

Related titles:

Bonelines ~ The Pattern ~ Rethinking Mythogeography ~ The Architect-Walker ~ Mythogeography ~ Counter-Tourism ~  Other Triarchy books on Walking​

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