Act quickly to get a rare copy of Cruising Speed—A Documentary, Bill Buckley’s stunning 1971 best-seller, which captures a Mach 5 week in the packed life of America’s premier conservative writer, pundit, speaker, sailor, columnist, editor, and TV-show host. Here’s how Keith Mano reviewed the book for the October 8, 1971 issue of NR:

Fifty pages into Cruising Speed I had begun to imagine William F. Buckley Jr., even at rest, as one of those futurist motion statues, bronze streamers that indicate momentum pennanting out from his heels and elbows. Cruising Speed is the diary of a single, an “ordinary” Buckley week. It is the sort of week that I have only experienced once in my life—on a tour during which my parents and I saw Switzerland, Spain and France in seven days and (it seemed) four glorious nights. The pace is infecting: it very nearly made me, a hunt and peck reader, into an Evelyn Wood graduate. Yet the pace is informed throughout by joy, by curiosity, by sharp insight, by a titanic kind of diligence. Cruising Speed is far and away the most consistently entertaining Buckley book. I wished it had been the record of a year, and a leap year at that.
The effect is stroboscopic: out of blurring motion a discernible image forms— Buckley the man. This is by no means a confession, the details are personal but never intimate; nonetheless, sufficient information is at hand to compose and tint a profile. Buckley is a shaper willing to be shaped: a compound of concern, affection, cheerfulness, wit (in all its thousand meanings), a Renaissance scope of interests, the whole graced with Renaissance sprezzatura. This, I suspect, is the most detailed account we will get until the (I hope) inevitable Autobiography, which will presumably appear with an annual two hundred-page volume to update it. Cruising Speed is precious for these shards of personality. It is also precious because it suggests a crescent trust in the reader, whether that reader’s position is right or left of center.

For four decades a box holding a dozen copies of the hardcover edition has been trapped in the NR basement. Recently freed, opened, and the treasures inside revealed, we figured: There’s no sense us hanging on to them when each can find a happier home in the library of an NRO’s Buckley aficionado. They’re rare as hen’s dentures, and truth be told a little less than pristine (you’d be too if you were at the bottom of a pile of boxes since Nixon was President!), but you can have a Buckley-stash copy of Cruising Speed for $75, which includes shipping and handling, and heck, we’ll even toss in a copy of our Obama Reader collection (just because we are nice guys and gals).