Jimmy Swan: The Joy Traveller

by Neil Munro

Jimmy Swan, the enigmatic commercial traveler, is another classic comic character from the pen of Neil Munro, the master Scottish humorist. The result of Swan's experiences is a wonderfully entertaining collection, allowing the reader a marvelous insight into daily life in the west of Scotland at the turn of the nineteenth century. Each story is brimful of local and period detail and the editors have provided a full set of notes explaining those historical, cultural, biographical, linguistic, and geographical references that may not be obvious to the twenty-first century reader, but would have been very familiar from the news pages of their daily papers to the early twentieth-century reader. In addition a full introduction is given, setting these Glasgow tales in their context and providing information about their author, Munro.

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Neil Munro was a Scottish journalist, newspaper editor, author and literary critic. He was born in Inveraray and worked as a journalist on various newspapers.

He was basically a serious writer, but is now mainly known for his humorous short stories, originally written under the pen name of Hugh Foulis. (It seems that he was not making a serious attempt to disguise his identity, but wanted to keep his serious and humorous writings separate.) The best known were about the fictional Clyde puffer the Vital Spark and her captain Para Handy, but they also included stories about the waiter and kirk beadle Erchie MacPherson, and the travelling drapery salesman Jimmy Swan.