MAC ORLAN, PIERE
Pierre Mac Orlans 1920 'Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer' was at once a paean to the adventure story, a tongue-in-cheek guidebook to the genres real-life practitioners and a grim if unspoken coda to the disasters of World War I. It must be established as a law that adventure in itself does not exist, Mac Orlan stipulates. Adventure is in the mind of the one who pursues it, and no sooner is he able to touch it with his finger than it vanishes, to reappear much farther off in another form, at the limits of the imagination.