The Great Railway Bazaar was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1975 and established Paul Theroux as the preeminent travel writer of his generation. The journey: London to Paris, through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Vietnam, Japan, and back through the Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Four months. Twenty-odd trains.
Theroux’s method — which became the template for literary travel writing for the next fifty years — was to treat the journey itself, not the destinations, as the subject. Trains are social spaces: people talk on trains in ways they never do on planes. The book’s best passages are portraits of fellow travelers — the Indian businessman explaining the caste system, the Afghan smuggler, the Japanese salaryman, the Soviet apparatchik — rendered with the same attention a novelist brings to fictional characters.
The book was also notable for Theroux’s willingness to be disagreeable. He did not romanticize poverty, did not pretend to understand cultures he encountered briefly, and did not spare himself: he records his own irritability, boredom, and prejudice alongside his moments of genuine wonder. This honesty — or calculated performance of honesty — became his signature.
Collecting The Great Railway Bazaar
First edition (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1975): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine in jacket: $150–$400
- US first edition (Houghton Mifflin): $80–$200
- Signed first: $300–$600