Pages to peruse in a deck chair

Transatlantic : Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships, Stephen Fox, Harper Collins: 496 pp., $29.95

*

Here is a hefty book best enjoyed on a slow, stately cruise ship by readers in love with these vast craft, their daring history and their tangled ancestry -- although there are some passages about icy passenger deaths by shipwreck. You might want to save those until you’re on land, or at least in the warm Caribbean.

The author, Stephen Fox, a Massachusetts-based historian without academic sinecure, gives a detailed account of some of the cruise trade’s first entrepreneurs and engineers, the men whose salesmanship and innovations made commercial transatlantic sea travel possible in the first half of the 19th century and routine by the 20th. More than a few striking biographical details are included along the way.

If you were schooled in the United States, for instance, you might know 19th century American Robert Fulton as the inventor of the steam engine. But a closer look at his career suggests he arrived in the trade a bit later than that, then lied to make himself look better. Fox dismisses him in a few pages, the better to examine this volume’s leading figures: Samuel Cunard, the socially awkward Canadian businessman and visionary who started by delivering transatlantic mail and built the passenger trade into a viable business; and Isambard Brunel, the theatrically inclined English engineer who turned his considerable intelligence and energy from railroads to the design of ships. One of Brunel’s first ship collaborations, the Great Western, set records in 1838 by crossing from Bristol, England, to New York in 15 1/2 days. His next two were epic failures.

“He loved any spotlight, courting it and capering in it, presenting himself in dramatic ways,” writes Fox of Brunel in one of the book’s most engaging passages. “He was a small man, about five feet four inches tall, with an olive complexion and blazing dark eyes under a strong brow. He moved about quickly, under clouds of cigar smoke.... Regardless of any contrary fashions, he wore a tall, cylindrical silk hat everywhere, even in his own traveling carriage. He explained, perhaps seriously, that it would protect his head from any blow by collapsing before the skull was struck. ‘It is at once warm and airy,’ he elaborated, ‘and you cannot improve upon it.’ (It also made him look taller.)”

Among the minor characters: young Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens, who made the crossing on Cunard’s Britannia in 1842. In a passage about the crossing in his book “American Notes,” Dickens described this ship’s grandest room as a “long, narrow apartment, not unlike a giant hearse” and characterized his cabin as a “profoundly preposterous box.” Still, he lived to scribble the tale, although scores of other early steamship passengers on other lines did not.

The year before, the rival steamship President had vanished at sea with 110 passengers and crew aboard. In 1854 the wreck of the U.S.-based Collins Line’s Arctic, on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, killed 258 of 281 passengers. Yet in a troubling hint of the every-man-for-himself chaos of the ship’s final minutes, 61 of the 153 crew members survived, including four of the top five officers. Other wrecks claimed more lives, but until the Titanic 58 years later, there wasn’t a nightmare at sea that could compare to the loss of the Arctic.

None of those lost ships, by the way, was part of the Cunard family. In that strictly supervised line’s first 75 years, the author notes, not a single passenger fatality from shipwreck was reported. (Then came the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, with about 1,200 killed.)

Nuggets like these can be arresting, and there are many here, including accounts from such early cruise passengers as John Quincy Adams and Frederick Douglass. But this isn’t an easy book. Despite an agreeable, often witty writing voice and prodigious amounts of research, Fox’s devotion to financial details and marine logistics and his relatively limited interest in shipboard sociology can bog down a reader. Lovers of engineering history and cruise lore will be happiest here. For the rest, it may be a long journey.

*

Pretty as 266

(or so) pictures

The Most Beautiful Villages of Spain, Hugh Palmer, Thames & Hudson: 208 pp., $40

*

Here’s just about the worst thing I can find about this book: The cover flap says it has 266 color illustrations; the title page says 274. Either way, they’re an evocative, magnetic collection, and because the 33 towns they explore are spread throughout Spain from plains to coast to Pyrenees foothills, they’re diverse too. Albarracin in the east clings to a ridge, crisscrossed with medieval alleys; Besalu nearby is arrayed around a crooked stone bridge that dates back a millennium. Ah, one actual complaint: The seven-page listing of hotels and restaurants in back features phone numbers but no Web sites and no hint of prices.

*

Getting serious about Greece

Greece, Dana Facaros and Linda Theodorou, Cadogan Guides: 858 pp., $21.95 paper

*

Based in London and now distributed in the U.S. by Globe Pequot, Cadogan has been publishing well-regarded guidebooks, more inclined toward culture than nature, for two decades. But only now are the editors getting around to covering all of Greece in one volume. It’s a serious effort, dense with text and, except for a medley of color photos in the opening pages and maps in back, strictly black and white. More than 1,000 lodgings and 800 restaurants are cited in these pages, the publishers say, with prices quoted in euros.

The authors aren’t averse to turning a phrase or two. Ermoupolis, on the Cycladic isle of Syros, is “a sweeping crescent meringue of a city,” and Batsi, on the isle of Andros, is known for “oozing contrived charms.”

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