Scouting For Boys

A trained scout will see little signs and tracks he puts them together in his mind and quickly reads a meaning from them such as an untrained man would never arrive at. A startling amalgam of Zulu war-cry and imperial and urban myth of borrowed tips on health and hygiene and object lessons in woodcraft Robert Baden-Powells Scouting for Boys (1908) is the original blueprint and self-instructor of the Boy Scout Movement. An all-time bestseller in the English-speaking world second only to the Bible this primer of yarns and pictures constitutes probably the most influential manual for youth ever published. Yet the book is at the same time a roughly composed hodge-podge of jingoist lore and tracker legend padded with lengthy"ations from adventure fiction and B-Ps own autobiography and
seamed through with the multiple anxieties of its time: fears of degeneration concerns about masculinity and self-restraint invasion paranoia.Elleke Boehmers edition of Scouting for Boys is the first to reprint the original text and illustrations and her fine introduction investigates a book that has been cited as an authority by militarists and pacifists capitalists and environmentalists alike.