How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays

Umberto Eco on how to avoid contagious diseases: “I read recently that according to the revelations of Professor Matre, heterosexual contact is carcinogenic. High time somebody came out and said it. I would go even farther: heterosexual contact causes death, period. Even a fool knows that it ends in procreation, and the more people are born, the more people die.”

Eco on the frustrations of trying to replace a lost driver’s license: “All of us know the ordinary terrorist is able to produce, in a few hours, dozens of fake licesnses – and remember, it takes more time to prodiuce a fake license than a genuine one. Now if we don’t want citizens who have lost their licenses to start frequenting murky taverns of ill fame in the hope of making contact with the Red Brigades, there is just one solution: employ all repentant terrorists in the license office.”

And that’s only the beginning: Eco on gadgets, including the Electric Nose Hair Remover (“an instrument that would have fascinated the Marquis de Sade”), Eco on 33-function watches, fax machines and cellular phones, express mail, in-flight meals, Amtrak trains, porn movies and Westerns, computer jargon, bureaucrats – you name it.” How to Travel with a Salmon is a “delightful romp through the absurdities of modern life.” (Publishers Weekly)

Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He is the author of numerous essays and novels, including the bestselling The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Island of the Day Before, and Baudolino.