SOMETHING WHOLESALE: My Life in the Rag Trade - Softcover

Back from World War II, young Eric Newby fell into a funk, moping at his parents’ home and daydreaming about becoming a traveler. Fed–up, the elder Newbys one day made him one: “We’re sending you to Sheffield with the Gown Collection.” And thus began his improbable, hilarious career as a commercial traveler for the antediluvian family firm, Lane & Newby Ltd., “Mantle Manufacturers and Wholesale Costumiers.” Something Wholesale, originally published in 1962 and added to in the ’70s and ’80s, is one of the sweetest, funniest, and most touchingly unassuming memoirs I’ve ever read. (If you just want to call it Newby’s best book, there’ll be no argument from us.)

Eric Newby was born in London in 1919. In 1938, he joined the four-masted Finnish barque Moshulu as an apprentice and sailed in the last Grain Race from Australia to Europe, by way of Cape Horn. During World War II, he served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section. In 1942, he was captured and remained a prisoner-of-war until 1945. He subsequently married the girl who helped him to escape, and for the next fifty years, his wife Wanda was at his side on many adventures. After the war, he worked in the fashion business and book publishing but always travelled on a grand scale, sometimes as the Travel Editor for the Observer. He was made CBE in 1994 and was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the British Guild of Travel Writers in 2001. Eric Newby died in 2006.