About the Book

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MYTHOGEOGRAPHY

A Guide to Walking Sideways

If you’ve ever walked and thought at the same time, you’ll love this book.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is:

2 parts - Wonderful story of a very long walk
1 part - Handbook of wild and extraordinary ideas about how to walk differently
1 dash - Angostura bitters

2 parts story
This is the gloriously funny and endlessly fascinating account of the author's recent journey on foot across the north of England in the footsteps of a man who made the same journey 100 years ago with a dog trouvé called Pontiflunk.

Buy it just for his inimitable account of the journey.

1 part handbook
The “handbook of drifting” later in the book has ideas on walking like a stalker, like a swimmer, like a ghost, like an explorer, like a pilgrim… and that’s just the start. Learn about the philosophy of walking, crabs in society, UFOs in Devon, Uri Geller, the political geography of cities, the madness of municipal history and much, much more (as they say). [There's much more about the much, much more once you get past the mushrooms.]

1 dash Angostura bitters (1904: Alfredo Siegert appointed purveyor of Angostura® aromatic bitters to the King of Prussia)
Technically speaking there are no Angostura Bitters in the book. Not even in the Lovely Edition. But when you find stuff like this in the book, Angostura Bitters seems quite an appropriate analogy really:

The Ferguson Gang - members included Sister Agatha, Erb the Smasher, the Bloody Bishop and ‘Kate O’Brien’ who turned up in a mask for a radio interview at the BBC in 1934. The Gang... wrote in blood.

The Air Loom Gang – a creation of the imagination of Bedlam resident Tilly Matthews, this gang hid in London cellars working on an elaborate air-weaving machine that... influenced the actions and the ideas that informed decision-making.

The Assassins of Beaminster – during the Second World War, in communities such as this quiet Dorset town, reliable young people were recruited into small local units, armed and trained...

Notes:

1. Walking isn’t what it used to be. It’s been deconstructed, theorised, analysed, performed, philosophised, disgraced and reinvented. This is a book about what walking has become.

2. If you want a simple definition of the term Mythogeography, you won’t get one. It’s more about ways of doing things than a theory. It’s about experiments rather than text books. It shares some genetic material with psychogeography, just as Psilocybe semilanceata has something in common with the Tesco closed cup. Compared to psychogeography it is probably more site-specific and more to do with some sense of life as a performance. (If this sounds elusive, that’s because most things worth catching are.)

3. This book might change the way you walk or look around you or leave you feeling baffled. Or all three.

4. Additionally, there are no actual film clips in the book. Because it is a book not a Kindle download. Although, heaven knows, that can't be far away. However, there are fantastic film clips on this website. Here beneath are a couple of little delights from Siobhan Mckeown's film of mythogeographer Phil Smith (the Crabman) (also YOUR AUTHOR) retracing the Devil's Footprints across Devon. Is that an easy sentence to understand? Oh yes indeed. They feature some humour but virtually no nudity, violence or swearing.

Courtesy of the Crabman himself, you can order copies of the 24 minute film (The Devil's Footprints) on DVD for just the cost of the postage. Contact him here.

Here’s the science: (read more about the book)
No, no more science, just let me buy the book
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