Gordon Silvester Boswell’s collaborative life story, The Book of Boswell: The Autobiography ofa Gypsy (1970) was the first Romani/Gypsy life story to be published by a mainstream publisher(Gollancz) in the UK. It is a deceivably complex autoethnographic text, but this complexity ismade even more ambivalent when the role and significance of the “interviewer,” transcriber andeditor, John Seymour, is taken into consideration. I will suggest that Boswell’s re-tellings of thepast in the present were affected by the collaboration between Boswell and Seymour – a writerof books on self-sufficiency. The resultant life story text (a conflation of voices) brought into focusa rhetoric of nature that glides towards close-to-nature romanticism. The life story was alsorepublished in 1973 by Penguin Books and then by Faber and Faber (Faber Finds) in 2012. Theparatexts (blurbs) on the two later editions seem not only to strengthen the close-to-naturethreshold projections of the life story content, but position John Seymour and his continuinginterest in self-sufficiency in a more prominent position as a sales strategy. This marketingtendency towards nature discourse has also had consequences concerning the thresholdrepresentations of other Romani/Gypsy and Traveller life stories.