Once upon a time, when you were somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, you were taken to visit an elderly relative, possibly a great-aunt or maybe your grandfather's best boyhood friend, and found yourself bored out of your head by the conversation of the adults around you.   In an act of what you later realized to be complicit sympathy, said elderly person suggested you might enjoy exploring the library.  After your parents were reassured that there was nothing valuable that would break, you were let in under stern warning then left to your own devices, to amuse yourself as best you would.  You poke around a bit, astonished, and not a little worried, by such titles as the Eighteenth Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, when suddenly you find it.  Wedged in, between Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, you pull out a smaller volume: King Solomon's Mines, the Man Who Would Be King, the Lost World.  You open it and are met with that particular "old book" smell; the pages are slightly browned; the text, a little formal, but so descriptive that you soon forget where you are, and you are filled with regret when your parents come to claim you some hours later.

It is this sense of wonder, excitement, and discovery that Jon Baird, ably assisted by Kevin Costner (yes, him), Stephen Meyer, and Rick Ross (illustrations) have sought to rekindle or introduce, depending, with The Explorers Guild, Vol 1: a Passage to Shambhala.

This is an old-fashioned traveler's tale, a ripping yarn, a Saturday-afternoon-at-the-movies story, cinematic in scope, and odyssean in the telling.  Except for the fragance, this volume recreates that literary excavation from tone to typeface, with book and chapter frontispiece illustrations reminiscent of Wyeth, Pyle, and Schooner.  Scenes in which text narration would slow down the story or confuse the reader (simultaneous events on opposite sides of the world or flashbacks, for instance) are told in illustrated form, two-color panels, more closely related to early "Classics Illustrated" or "Little Nemo" than contemporary graphic novels or manga.

I was intrigued by the Explorers Guild because of its presentation; I was captured by the end of its second  paragraph.  Through an old-fashioned visual and textual style it promised Adventure and Romance and did not disappoint.  I loved this book, and eagerly await a Volume Two, if such a thing should come to be.