Venice The Great Cities

Venice — The Great Cities (1978)
Author: Aubrey Menen • Publisher: Time-Life Books
ISBN: 0705404889
Condition: Good (briskly gondolable)
Imprint: Crappy Old Books

Behold the coffee-table gondola that actually goes places. Aubrey Menen—essayist, wit, occasional heretic—takes Time-Life’s glossy camera by the hand and leads it through La Serenissima with the air of someone who has read the footnotes and decided which ones deserve a drink. This isn’t just canals and clichés (though the canals behave spectacularly); it’s Venice as a functioning hallucination: stone that floats, water that rules, tourists that multiply, and saints who keep an eye on the timetables.

The pictures do that late-70s thing in the best way: saturated skies, water the colour of oxidised jewellery, façades wearing five centuries of makeup and none of the shame. You get Basilica di San Marco in all its Byzantine swagger, the Doge’s Palace pretending it’s weightless, Accademia bridges that know your angles, workmen with boats for pockets, and a cast of pigeons who think they’re shareholders. Menen’s text is dry as a good biscuit—history, gossip, and precision snark, all arranged so you can sound marvellously informed while pointing at a photograph and saying “that campanile fell over once, you know.”

Condition “Good” here means the book has sailed a few coffee tables and returned without barnacles. The jacket shows honest shelf-rub (call it patina di vaporetto), boards are square, binding steady, pages clean and glossy with only the lightest sun-kiss to the edges—more Giudecca glow than librarian’s sigh. No coffee rings, no lagoon deposits; just the civilised aura of a volume that has been opened with intention and closed with satisfaction.

Use cases (tested between tides):

• Plot a day that looks like a century: morning at Frari, noon at Rialto, dusk on Zattere, evening pretending you live there.

• Win dinner arguments with the sentence: “Menen’s right—Venice is a republic disguised as a city.”

• Colour-match your living room to Istrian stone, verdigris shutters, and polite algae.

• Cure a case of “I only know San Marco” with two flips and a footnote.

Bluffer’s crib (deploy while stirring a Negroni):

• “Venice isn’t sinking; she’s negotiating.”

• “Those brick lace patterns? Bassi rilievi for people who read façades.”

• “The secret of Venice is maintenance; the miracle is that it’s still beautiful after it.”

• “Every traghetto is a philosophy seminar with oars.”

Physical particulars, frankly declared: dust jacket lightly edge-worn; colours bright; plates crisp; text clean; no inscriptions; spine uncracked but ready; faint whiff of bookshop and sea air (purely imaginary, thoroughly recommended).

Ideal for: armchair flâneurs, canal-level historians, incurable romantics, architectural rubber-neckers, and anyone who suspects “getting lost” is the only proper Venetian verb.

Crappy Old Books guarantee: we don’t sell mint; we sell well-travelled and seaworthy. If you want Venice with wit, pictures with patience, and a guide who refuses to gush when a raised eyebrow will do, this is your passage. Bring sensible shoes and a sense of humour; the tide waits for no one.

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