The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World, Lonely Planet
Following the trend of LP’s other Big Books the book’s jacket is not impressive (gold background and big fat title with some teeny-weeny little photos stuck in the middle), which is a shame as coffee table books should shine as art from the outside in, but you’ll probably always have it propped open- no worries except for all those coffee cup rings on Moldova.
So who doesn’t love a book you can open to any page and get huge, gorgeous photos overlapping two pages per nation with a sidebar of Useful Information? Close your eyes and open the Travel Book about half way (page 209 out of 447) and you get Kiribati (hands up everyone who already knew about these 33 small South Pacific islands). A dominating photo of azure sea, thatched hut, fishermen and blue, blue skies are juxtaposed under a trio of riveting smaller photos: Young Girl in native dance shell headdress, Heart-Shaped Shell Midden/Harbor in aforementioned azure sea, and identically smug grins by Toddler and Woman tending a catch line-up of Very Big Fish stood on their heads awaiting purchase. Rich colors, endless sea, compelling humans.
Or flip forward a hundred pages plus to the P’s (the book is sensibly alphabetized) and you get Poland (p. 321). Big photo gives us Czocha Castle in Lesna under a fresh powdering of snow, an autumnal walk over russet leaves under the huge trunks of Wolski Forest, and two detailed Warsaw photos (soldiers/church). But that’s not all! For every country’s gorgeous pictures we also get that very Lonely Planet sidebar. One paragraph in bold gives us a nutshell nation intro (Poland’s starts with geographical location but very quickly gets to vodka) and a set list of headings. Still in Poland we get a sort of Alice Does Wonderland list: Best Time To Visit (May-September), Top Things To See, Top Things To Do (Death Camp memorials, European bison, Hiking to the Black Madonna and Tatra Mountains). Getting Under the Skin. Read This Book, Listen To This Music, Watch These Films, Eat This Food (pieriogi or borscht), and Drink This Beverage (back to vodka) round out the advice snippets. You get the feeling that the book’s contributors thoroughly enjoyed this kind of list-making.
In A Word gives us a useful greeting (Dzien dobry—good day), Trademarks (Pope John Paul II, pierogi, vodka, Joseph Conrad), Random Fact (Marie Curie) and a mini map. That’s a lot of good stuff in a short list and it’s hedged in by a sideways sidebar giving us the kind of information we might need for our 7th grade geography report (Capital, Population, Area and Official Language).
So who buys books like this? Hopefully someone who wants to give you one, if your coffee table is up to it. If it doesn’t, you might go for the book in its mini edition, 4 pages per country, still fat but less than half the weight. And what about our own United States of America? We get the same two pages New Guinea gets (Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Central Park) and FYI LP recommends in Getting Under the Skin that we watch Dr. Strangelove, listen to Willy Nelson, eat regional cuisine (what a cop-out), drink microbrews and California reds and learn to greet the locals in their own tongue by saying, “Yo!” “Howdy!” “Hi!”
Wandering Booklust/Meg Robbins