A Cargo Of Parrots

A Cargo of Parrots (1938) by R. Hernekin Baptist
Macmillan • ISBN: none (pre-barcode, pre-nonsense) • Condition: Good (spine with a jaunty list to starboard)

Part travelogue, part caper, part ornithological stand-up routine, A Cargo of Parrots sails breezily through the between-the-wars world with a hold full of feathers and opinions. R. Hernekin Baptist—whose name sounds perfectly invented even if it isn’t—ushers you from jungle edge to dockside, through customs sheds, shipping offices and clubs where the gin is tepid and the conversation is not. Every stop delivers a fresh chorus of squawks: parrots commenting on humanity in flawless mimicry, and humanity answering back in paperwork.

Expect steamers, sidings, and the gentle thump of crates marked “LIVE, DO NOT TIP,” which everyone immediately tips. Expect consuls who are never quite at their desks, quartermasters who have seen it all, and a narrator who suspects the parrots are running a more coherent operation than the shipping lines. The humour is dry enough to qualify as a climate; the observations land like postcards written in pencil during a thunderstorm. Somewhere between a comic report and a gentlemanly escapade, it’s the sort of tale that smells faintly of spilled ink, rope, and tropical rain that missed its appointment.

Is it high literature? Perhaps not. Is it high entertainment? Absolutely—especially if your idea of a good time is watching bureaucracy and birds attempt to out-talk each other. The pages feel like dispatches from a world where maps are persuasive, timetables are optimistic, and parrots learn new phrases faster than officials stamp forms.

This copy from Crappy Old Books is graded Good: clean, complete, and very much seaworthy. The spine is slightly slanted—call it rakish, like a captain’s cap in a headwind. Shelves adore a bit of character; so do we. Binding sound, pages ready for voyage, parrots (regrettably) not included.

File under: Travel & capers with feathers, Pre-war ports and post-hoc wisdom, and Things that talk back. Read it for the atmosphere, keep it for the voice, and display it for the title alone—which does an admirable job of announcing its intentions.

Crappy Old Books: we ship books with stories, and stories with just enough tilt to prove they’ve been somewhere.

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