In Canetti's writings, I once found the sentence: "He did not write his novels, he walked them." I wondered how Canetti could know this about me. Walter Kappacher put his thoughts on walking and writing to paper much later. They can be read in this anniversary volume, along with numerous notes, finds, and other prose texts that bring the writer quite close. Writing, one learns, has always been a craft to be mastered for the trained motorcycle mechanic, except that the author's apprenticeship never ends. In the American travel diary, Kappacher describes coming home to the land of red stones—a feeling that was often denied to him as a child: his father remained a stranger to him throughout his life. He entrusts a diary spanning over twenty years to Goethe's son, August.