““When he wasn't too sick to sit up, Roosevelt sought comfort and distraction in the world that he knew best: his library. For his trip to Africa, he had spent months choosing the books that he would take with him, ordering special volumes that had been beautifully bound in pigskin, with type reduced to the smallest legible size, so that the books would be as light as possible. Roosevelt, Kermit wrote, "read so rapidly that he had to plan very carefully in order to have enough books to last him through a trip.””
