Project Gutenberg 2025-03-31 Public domain in the USA. 297 Firestone, Clark B. (Clark Barnaby) 1869 1957 Firestone, Clark Barnaby Hambidge, Ruth Millais, John Everett 1829 1896 Millais, John Everett, Sir, bart. Millais, Sir John Everett 24028913 The coasts of illusion : $b A study of travel tales First edition. $aNew York :$bHarper & Brothers, $c1924. Marco talks with his neighbors -- Preface -- The world that was -- The earth itself -- Inanimate nature -- The animal kingdom -- The fabulous beasts -- Fable upon wings -- The dragon -- Denizens of the deep -- The peoples of prodigy -- The satyrs -- The pygmies -- The Amazons of legend -- The Amazons of history -- The folk of tradition -- The horizon lands -- Lands of legend -- Islands of enchantment -- The terrible ocean -- The Sargasso Sea -- Atlantis -- The gilded man -- The dream quests of Spain -- The fabric of illusion -- The travel tales of mankind -- The gains of fable. Alan, Hannah Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "The Coasts of Illusion: A Study of Travel Tales" by Clark B. Firestone is a historical and literary analysis written in the early 20th century. The book explores the myths, legends, and half-truths woven into travel literature through the ages, focusing on how these narratives shaped humanity’s perception of the earth and its inhabitants. Rather than examining the supernatural, the work delves into the imaginative and sometimes fanciful ways in which people explained unknown lands, creatures, and phenomena before the age of modern geography and science. The opening of this study sets the tone by invoking the legendary adventures of Marco Polo, whose tales blend fact with hearsay and wonder, and uses his imagined dialogue with Venetians to illustrate how travel stories both fascinated and amused people. The preface clarifies that Firestone aims to survey the world as filtered through myths, exploring how geography, peoples, animals, and even natural phenomena like rivers or stones were distorted or imagined anew. Early chapters describe how maps once depicted both real and fantastical lands, and recount a host of beliefs about the world’s shape, the mystical properties of plants and stones, and the marvels attached to animals. The text emphasizes the power of human imagination—driven by hope, fear, or wishful thinking—in constructing a world of marvels that persisted until relatively modern times. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/coastsofillusion0000clar 20240124115542firestone 1924 us Reading ease score: 64.4 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read. en Legends Geographical myths G Text Category: Mythology, Legends & Folklore Category: Travel Writing Category: Archaeology & Anthropology 1291468 2025-07-30T05:08:31.312047 text/html 1172195 2025-03-31T12:24:42 text/html 4815833 2025-07-30T05:08:52.324963 application/epub+zip 4811276 2025-07-30T05:08:35.466051 application/epub+zip 695095 2025-07-30T05:08:33.393024 application/epub+zip 5949430 2025-07-30T05:09:04.140396 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 5851449 2025-07-30T05:08:50.333934 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 958842 2025-07-30T05:08:27.497094 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 938863 2025-03-31T12:24:42 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 18057 2025-07-30T05:09:04.333442 application/rdf+xml 17452 2025-07-30T05:08:33.805043 image/jpeg 2306 2025-07-30T05:08:33.601031 image/jpeg 4785418 2025-07-30T05:08:31.493078 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia