Nix on Pix in New Book by National Geographic

The magazine is known for its stunning photographs, but some people insist they buy it for the articles. Now, as if to prove them right, a book of some of the National Geographic’s best articles is on the market, and it doesn’t contain a single picture.

Instead of high-quality, arty photographs, “From the Field: A Collection of Writings from National Geographic” is filled with the words of Theodore Roosevelt and Maya Angelou, Joseph Conrad and Shelby Foote, Charles Lindbergh and William O. Douglas.

No photos?

“That was the condition under which I did it,” explained Charles McCarry, who edited the book.

“I’ve felt for a long time . . . that the text was lost among the pictures. I’ve always felt that if I could find a way to separate out the text and let people see it naked and entire, that its virtues would become obvious,” McCarry said in a telephone interview.

Indeed, the book speaks for itself.

* “It was a fine morning. The wind of the last two days had subsided and the going was the best and most equable of any I had yet. The floes were large and old, hard and clear, and were surrounded by pressure ridges, some of which were almost stupendous.” Explorer Robert E. Peary on his search for the North Pole, September 1909.

* “. . . there was a succession of snorts like a steam engine blowing off steam. It was a rhinoceros. . . . While a rhinoceros’s short suit is brains, his long suit is courage, and he is a particularly exasperating creature to deal with, because he has not sense enough to know that you can harm him, and he has enough bad temper to want to harm you.” Theodore Roosevelt, January 1911.

* “The heartbreaking tenderness of black women and their majestic strength speak of the heroic survival of a people who were stolen into subjugation, denied chastity, and refused innocence.” Maya Angelou, August 1989.

* “Cock an ear on some calm day in the woods or fields or on the grass-carpeted lip of that tall bluff, and you may hear, behind the stillness, the cries of battle mingling the deep-throated Union roar with the weird halloo of the Rebel yell, the boom of guns and the rattle of musketry, fading to give way at last to the groans of the wounded blue and gray, and the singing of the bone saws.” Shelby Foote, “Echoes of Shiloh,” July 1979.

McCarry, now an author living in Massachusetts, was formerly a senior editor at National Geographic. “I kept pushing . . . to run an all-text piece, but it was just too much of a break. I used to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have this great big patch of gray right in the middle of the magazine?’ ”

Finally, someone at the National Geographic Society stumbled across a memo he had written 15 years earlier, proposing the all-text book, and decided it was a good idea.

McCarry, who wrote an official history of the magazine a decade ago, returned to the archives to search out the best writing. In selecting stories, he used categories that reflect the magazine itself, such as an American story, an adventure story or an animal story.

“There were at least 10,000 possibilities,” he said.