I don’t know why it captured my eye. It was just another spine on a shelf of dozens of other spines. I’m talking about book spines by the way. A secondhand bookshop I have come to frequent here in Adelaide has amassed the most amazing collection of Penguin paperback titles – from the classic orange covers of great and small fiction, the green of of crime fiction, the blue of biography and memoirs, the red of the great dramas.

The cerise of the cover which caught my eye denoted travel and adv...