I listed as one of my favourite books "Ich radle um die Welt", written by Heinz Helfgen who in September 1951 at the age of 41 left Germany with a borrowed bicycle and DM 3.80 in his pockets. His aim: to cycle around the world! Which he did in 800 days at the end of which he wrote a two-volume book that sold 600,000 copies and captured the imagination of every German schoolboy at the time, myself included.
According to his biography, Heinz Helfgen died, aged 70, in 1990, and today he's all but forgotten and not one of my fellow-bloggers lists his book as their favourite. His original two-volume book and the one-volume "Neuausgabe" re-printed in 1988 have pride of place on my bookshelf to this day!
(Another German, Oskar Speck, paddled a kayak all the way from Germany to Australia. He never got around to writing a book about it so that his remarkable feat remains almost unknown, something which I tried to change by publishing a website about him.)
