Graham Coster never saw himself as a writer. It was a publisher he wanted to be, from school-days onwards. As his latest offering, Back to the Source, reminds us, he’s been remarkably successful as both. It’s a book that appears under his own imprint, Safe Haven, which he set up 10 years ago. And it’s a collection of feature and travel pieces which, he says, “shows where, and how, a small publisher started out”.

Coster didn’t get round to publishing until he was almost 40, having got “waylaid” by writing. After reading English at Cambridge and working for the literary magazine Granta, he wrote a novel and, in his efforts to publicise it, fell into a new occupation as a freelance feature and travel writer. A freelance offering ideas from left field, that is, filing for the travel pages about places no one usually went to, and for the motoring pages not about the latest hot hatch but about ice-cream vans or about vintage country buses running Sunday services in the Surrey Hills. He also wrote travel books, including one about journeys with long-distance truck drivers in Europe and the US (A Thousand Miles from Nowhere) that was short-listed for the 1996 Thomas Cook Award.

When he did move into publishing, initially with Aurum Press, he took a similar approach, his commissions including the first full-length book on the sport of fell-running. In 2015 — a couple of years after he’d lost his job with Aurum — he started Safe Haven, with an equally quirky book by the cheapest author he could find — himself: Snow Stopped Play: The Mysterious World of the Cricket Ground in Winter. Among the 25 books published since are a guide to the street trees of London (which has gone into three editions) and another (which has sold more than 13,000 copies) on the fabric used to upholster London’s Tube and bus seats — the specialist subject of a contestant earlier this month on the BBC show Mastermind.

Back to the Source has articles that were initially published between 1989 and 2024. Among them are accounts of Coster’s own travels, everywhere from the Great Sandy Desert in Australia to the blues clubs of Chicago, and interviews with Norman Lewis and Eric Newby. Among them, too, are a piece on the British Harmonica Championships (in which he himself competed) and an interview with a manufacturer… of traffic cones.

Readers of Deskbound Traveller can buy Back to the Source: Journeys in Search of a Safe Haven at a 10% discount through the Safe Haven site; just use the code DESK10 when ordering.

Interest declared: I’ve been doubly fortunate in my contacts with Graham Coster, first commissioning him as a writer when I was a travel editor and later being commissioned by him, while he was at Aurum, to edit three anthologies of travel writing.