Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World » (Reprint)

Todd Pruzan is an editor at the bimonthly design journal Print and has been an editor and writer at several other magazines. He was born in Washington, D.C., and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Mortimer (1802-78) spent most of her 40-year career writing extremely popular children's books, but in the middle of it, she wrote a geographical trilogy that managed to insult just about every nationality in the world. American writer and publisher Pruzan stumbled across them, and here excerpts some of the most amusing passages. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Henry Alford

To the modern eye, Mortimer's work -- by turns unsettling and hilarious -- is nothing short of a revolution in guidebook writing: here, at last, is irritable-bowel-syndrome-as-travelogue.