In design this book forms a coherent whole. The title-page with its blue tint in which is a “window” for a calligraphic title suggests a passport, and the passport is the theme of the text. The blue is repeated in the map on the endpapers and combined with buff and gold on the gracefully-devised binding. Throughout the body, the small sections of the text occasioned by the diary form are well spaced, so that they can never break awkwardly on a page. Only in the decorative elements on the chapter heads is there something extraneous that does not conform with the rest of the pattern.

Peter Beilenson, Paul McPharlin, Ernst Reichl (Jurors)