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I just got an email from Laura Miller, founder of Salon.com, who's set up a blog to plug her own book, and she says she thinks of it as the equivalent of a special features DVD, with deleted scenes, bloopers, alternate endings and so on. With this in mind, here's the one bit of The Lost Art of Walking that I hated to cut, though I could see the reason to do it:

I once led a walking tour of Munich. It was part of a literary festival about the writer and the city. The invited writers had to conduct walking tours, the city seen through foreign eyes - that sort of thing. I accepted the challenge, but as the time to go to Munich approached I wished I was something other than a writer; or at least somebody with an act that could be performed in the street.

I took it far too seriously, as is my way. I was living in New York at the time, and I spent a lot of time fretting about what I was going to do. I walked the streets of thinking I needed a concept, an idea. And as I walked I looked for signs of German influence in New York. In a perfect world I might have come across the Lederhosen district, or the Munich Bar and Grill, but I was prepared to settle for much less.

Most of the walking I've ever done has been alone, in various cities. Of course I know that I'm always following in somebody's footsteps, and I also know that a lot of writers are also walkers. I'm happy to have fellow literary travelers even if they're not physically walking with me at the time. I find it impossible, for example, to walk down Oxford Street in London without thinking that's where Thomas De Quincey walked, and where he bought his first dose of opium.

In the course of writing Lost Art, I learned that Will Self was also doing a book of walking, called Psychogeography, a collection of his walking pieces from The Independent. Of course I didn't dare read his book until I'd finished my own. And now, thanks to The Believer, we've had a correspondence about walking, drifting, sex and drugs. The interview can be found here.

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I see that when looking for directions on Google maps, you're now offered walking routes as well as driving routes, with the ominous warning "Walking directions are in beta. Use caution - This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths." I'll say.

I tracked the walking route Google suggests I use to get from my house to my favorite bar, a journey I'm reasonably familiar with. The recommended Google route would involve me climbing over a metal fence topped with razor wire, into private a gated community that has an "armed response" warning, and then crossing various people's lawns and yards to a locked gate on the other side.

Now, I like adventure in my walking, and I certainly don't mind doing a little light trespassing, and I definitely think that private, gated streets are an abomination. But this still seems too much to take on. I continue to make my way to the bar by the tried and trusted route.

To be fair, Google directs you by exactly the same route even when you're in a car, which would make it even more exciting. The map, as Alfred Korzybski would be the first to tell you, is not the territory. I still don't know what "Walking directions are in beta" means.

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In writing the book there was never any problem finding enough information about walking and walkers. The problem was always more about what to leave out than what to include. I'm happy to stand by the decisions I made. But every now and then I find a new snippet of information and I'm disappointed that it's too late to include it in the book.

For instance I just saw an interview with Richard Branson, in Parade magazine. They asked, "Are Americans too afraid of taking risks?" And Branson replied, "People do need to be a bit braver. When I was 4 years old, my mother dropped me out of the car to walk three miles to my grandmother's house-to find my own way." Wha?

I would love to have been a fly on the wall of granny's house when young Richard walked in the door: I'm assuming he did walk in the door, though the interview doesn't actually say so. I wonder what kind of celebrations they had.

My other recent discovery, on just reading Bran Stoker's "Dracula" - for the first time I'm ashamed to admit - is that an awful lot of trouble starts because Lucy Westenra, who is quite the sexy minx, goes sleep walking, that's when Dracula gets her, bites her in the neck and turns her into one of his vampires. A lesson learned there.

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This is the blog for my new book The Lost Art of Walking, a personal wander (stroll? meander? peregrination?) through the history, science, literature, photography, even performance art, of walking.

A couple of early reviews - and I'm told that early reviews mean nothing - seemed to find the book curiously benign. Kirkus Reviews used the word "amiable." Publishers Weekly said "genial."

This came as a bit of a shock. I'd rather fancied myself as the mad dog of pedestrianism, snarling and howling as I strode manically down mean streets and alleyways of perambulation. Still, trust the tale not the teller, I suppose.

The fiercest walker I've ever met is Bruce Gilden, a New York street photography. He not only seems to regard walking as a struggle and a conflict, but sometimes as hand to hand combat. Perhaps he's the walker I'd like to be. There's an interview with Bruce in the book.

It contains a consideration of street photography, and about the way that street photographers do a great deal of walking and inevitably photograph a great number of walkers. I make no claims for myself as a photographer, but I did take a lot of photographs as wrote this book. They're available here on Youtube as a plug-cum-trailer for The Lost Art of Walking.

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Geoff Nicholson is our guest blogger during the week of November 24th. If you have any questions for Geoff Nicholson, add a comment to any of his posts. Here is some more information about The Lost Art of Walking:

A fascinating, definitive, and very personal rumination on the history, science, philosophy, art, and literature of walking, by a skilled cultural commentator.

Geoff Nicholson, author of Bleeding London and Sex Collectors, turns his eye to the intellectual and cultural history of that most common of activities-walking. This simple, omnipresent activity has inspired numerous subcultures, literary and artistic legacies, sporting events, personal memories, epic journeys, mystical revelations, and scandals.

It's a rich tradition that embraces such novelists as Charles Dickens and Paul Auster, musicians like Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan, and moviemakers from Buster Keaton to Werner Herzog. But it's also a tradition that includes obsessives and eccentrics, such as the artist Mudman, who coats his body in mud and then walks the city streets; competitive pedestrians such as Captain Barclay, who walked one mile an hour for a thousand successive hours; and gang members who use the hidden language of the "Crip Walk" to spell out messages in the dirt with their scuffing. How we walk, where we walk, why we walk announces who and what we are.