Out in April

The Salt Road

The book

Four hundred pages, one journey

A trade route, the people who kept it open, and what happened in the eighty years after it closed. Told as a single walk from one end to the other rather than as a survey.

The research

Six years, mostly in archives

Customs ledgers, three surviving letter collections, and a fortnight on the road itself with a translator. Where the record stops, the book says so instead of filling the gap.

Why now

The route reopened in 2019

Not as a trade road but as a border crossing, which is how the archive came out of a basement in the first place. Half the material in the book had never been read.

The object

Sewn, not glued

Cloth over boards, a folded map in the back, and paper heavy enough that the map does not show through the last chapter. It will open flat on a table in twenty years.

Signed first editions

Numbered to five hundred, signed on the title page, and shipped in the first week of April before the trade edition.