You can blame this one on Davide Mana, and his Salgari post over at Karavansara, for reminding me of how I too was subjected to Salgari as a child: in Italy there used to be this curious notion that no childhood could be considered complete without a hefty dose of Malay Pirates and Multi-coloured Corsairs. That went especially for boys, but girls weren’t always allowed to go immune…

I, for one, wasn’t. One summer day, when I was about ten, a distant cousin of my mother’s descended on me with a whole box of vintage Salgari – his own childhood reading choice, some fifteen or twenty hardbacks, with tiger-coloured* covers. He had loved them, he said, and I was going to love them too. Continue reading →