Three Men on the Bummel

The same three friends, ten years older and two of them married, take their bicycles to the Black Forest. A customs post, a hill, a hosepipe, and a nation whose respect for regulations Jerome finds by turns admirable and alarming. He wrote it in 1900 because his publisher wanted the sequel, and the chapters on German orderliness read very differently now than they did then. Fifty-eight plates of German and European painting from 1820 to 1925, among them Carl Spitzweg and Caspar David Friedrich, show the roads, customs posts and sea views that give this cycling tour its weather and its mood.