John Hatt’s Eland was the first of a wave of travel lists that emerged in the early 1980s, quickly joined by Century Travellers, the Penguin Classic Travel Library, Picador and Virago. The Eland has now and then been domesticated but they are essentially nomadic, which is partly true for those who work at Eland, who have spent as much of their time as journalists, writers, editors, musicians and dragoman-guides as behind a desk. Eland can never define exactly what we are looking for in a book until we stumble across it, but itneeds to be observant of others, capable of summing up the spirit of a place and catching the moment on the wing. Eland continues, very much as it first started, with between two and eight new titles a year, and run from an attic. It is a classic tale of the Hare and the Tortoise, or should one say the Leopard and the Eland. For one of the defining characteristics of the Eland is that it is no good at high speeds but 'can trot along at fourteen miles an hour indefinitely'.