Hence this enthusiastically zany writeup of The Clumsiest People in Europe by William Times in the Grimes, I mean the other way around. Why not print all of it? Will the Times sue me? I think not. The boldface is mine, to indicate my favorite Mrs. Mortimerism thus far. Don't forget that the author (rather than, as Grimes would have it, merely the "excerpter"), Todd Pruzan, is reading at the Chelsea B&N next Wednesday, June 15, at 7 p.m. He'll be signing copies of the book, which, being the intellectually hungry person you are, you will already have bought and read. There are a lot of sad stories out there, and once in a while it pays to read a funny one.

In Mrs. Mortimer's Best Guess, the Place Is Unspeakable

THE CLUMSIEST PEOPLE IN EUROPE
Or Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World
By Todd Pruzan and Favell Lee Mortimer
Illustrated. 198 pages. Bloomsbury. $19.95.

Planning a foreign trip? Wales might be nice. But unfortunately it is filled with Welsh people, who are "not very clean." Spain might look alluring, but the Spanish tend to be "cruel, and sullen and revengeful." Portugal perhaps? Tread cautiously. "Some places look pretty at a distance which look very ugly when you come up to them - Lisbon is one of these places."

There is almost no incentive to step out the front door in the strange, cruel, wildly prejudiced guidebooks of Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer, a tough-minded Victorian children's writer whose astonishing thoughts on foreign lands have been excerpted by Todd Pruzan in "The Clumsiest People in Europe." Spanning the globe, Mrs. Mortimer, in three volumes published between 1849 and 1854, delivered crisp, no-nonsense opinions on peoples and countries from Sweden to Bechuanaland, even though her own foreign travel, at that point, was limited to a brief childhood trip to Brussels and Paris.

Mr. Pruzan, an editor of the design journal Print, chanced upon Mrs. Mortimer's first travel book, "The Countries of Europe Described," in a second-hand bookstore on Martha's Vineyard. Appalled and enchanted, he rustled up copies of "Far Off, Part I: Asia and Australia Described" and "Far Off, Part II: Africa and America Described," selected the best bits and assembled them in volume that, although slim, imparts the general flavor (acrid) and point of view (perverse) of the unbelievable Mrs. Mortimer.

Mrs. Mortimer liked England best. But that's not saying much. The English, like nearly all peoples on earth except for the Dutch, are not very clean. They make disagreeable company, they are "too fond of money" and they complain too much. "Is London a pleasant city?" Mr. Mortimer asks. "No; because there is so much fog and so much smoke. This makes it dark and black." On the plus side, England is Protestant, unlike, say, Turkey, where the people believe in a false prophet named Muhammad ("a wicked man"), who "wrote a book called the Koran, and filled it with foolish stories, and absurd laws, and horrible lies."

China has three religions, none good, though the religion of Confucius is possibly less bad than the others. Lao-tzu, the father of Taoism, cannot fool Mrs. Mortimer ("What an awful liar this man must have been") and Buddhism gets short shrift. "Buddha pretended he could make people happy; and his way of doing so was very strange," she writes. "He told them to think of nothing, and then they would be happy."

Closer to home, and on similar grounds, Mrs. Mortimer downgrades Belgium, despite its industrious people: "Alas! they worship idols. They are Roman Catholics." Everywhere, people do strange things and practice strange beliefs. Mrs. Mortimer never ceases to be shocked. Just picture the Bechuanas of Africa, who cover their bodies with mutton fat and ocher, and yet "they always laugh when they hear of customs unlike their own; for they think that they do everything in the best way, and that all other ways are foolish." Strange.

Mrs. Mortimer's prejudices are erratic. She can be much more savage describing Europeans than the darker races, some of which she finds quite attractive, doling out compliments to the "Hindoos," American Indians and Nubians, "a fine race of people, tall and strong, and of a bright copper color." Adamantly antislavery, she takes the American South to task and, in a perceptive analysis of the racial situation, holds the North to account as well for its poor treatment of blacks.

She makes a very weak imperialist. The Afghans, although "cruel, covetous and treacherous," have every right to resent the British. "We cannot blame the Afghans for defending their own country," she writes. "It was natural for them to ask, 'What right has Britain to interfere with us?' " More on the United States would have been welcome. Mrs. Mortimer limits herself to the usual British complaints of the time. Americans eat too fast and spit too much. New York she finds, without actually having been there, much more beautiful than London. She understands that prairie dogs are not actually dogs, but believes that they bark, and that real American dogs do not. Lake Superior is very big. It is, in fact, so big "that Ireland might be bathed in it, as a child is bathed in a tub; that is, if islands could be bathed."

A strong streak of sadism runs through Mrs. Mortimer's travel writing. She likes to remind her young readers of the terrible things that can happen abroad. In Hungary, evil swineherds might order their pigs to attack you, so steer clear of the woods. In Spain, wolves have been known to tear travelers apart, leaving nothing but bones. The mountains of Switzerland may be beautiful, but when the snow begins to slide, a house can fall right on top of you.

There is a simple way to avoid all the unpleasantness, and Mrs. Mortimer's fellow countrymen know the secret. The English, she writes, "like best being at home, and this is right."