Walking-Stick Papers

In an age of Twitter feeds and hot takes, here is a book that teaches you to slow down and notice. Robert Cortes Holliday's 1918 essays are exactly what the title promises: the companionable musings of a man who walks through the world with a walking stick and returns with stories. He writes about New York, about books, about the peculiar people he encounters and the small moments that make up a life. These are not essays in the academic sense. They are conversations overheard, observations made over coffee, the kind of things a literate man might tell you on a late afternoon. Christopher Morley called Holliday's gift 'pleasantly eccentric,' and that phrase captures it perfectly: there is something gently odd and deeply human about his prose. The writing has the quality of an older, more patient America, when people still had time to amble and reflect. For readers who miss the personal essay as an art form, or who want to remember what it felt like to read something that was not trying to go viral, these pages offer a quiet, companionable refuge.