Associated Press: Travel Books Worth Giving
AP travel writer Beth Harpaz recently interviewed several travel bookstore owners, including our own Pat Carrier, for an article about the perfect gift for the traveler. “Booksellers from three travel bookstores…offered their recommendations for travel books that make good holiday gifts, from coffee-table books filled with gorgeous photos, to travelogues of long-ago adventures in faraway places, to practical guidebooks for every type of traveler.” What follows is the list of suggestions from the three bookstores.
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World Heritage Sites: A Complete Guide to 878 UNESCO World Heritage Sites
The first book that full describes every official UNESCO World Heritage site – the world’s most extraordinary places – covers 141 countries and highlights the fascinating facts of almost 900 properties, including 20 in America and 15 in Canada.
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Sites of Antiquity
from the Blue Guides series
Charles Freeman’s book takes 50 sites from Syria and Sinai to southern France and the Solway Firth, stretching right across what became the Roman Empire, to show how civilisation developed in the Mediterranean and spread through Europe, Asia Minor, north Africa and parts of Arabia.
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How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architectural Styles
by Carol Davidson Cragoe
This practical primer is a handbook for decoding a building’s style, history, and evolution. Every building contains clues embedded in its design that identify not only its architectural style but also the story of who designed it, who it was built for, and why.
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The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography
by Katharine Harmon
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists’ maps, that happy combination of information and illusion.
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The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writings
written by W. Somserset Maugham, edited by Pico Iyer
Maugham worked as a secret agent in Russia, published novels in London, staged plays in New York, and traveled throughout Europe, Asia, India, and the United States, chronicling his travels, wherever he went, with exceptional insight. Iyer selects vignettes of Maugham’s prose that track his transformation from a boyish traveler in Spain to a worldly man of letters.
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Stanfords Travel Classics
New editions of classic travel narratives by writers such as Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
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Travelers’ Tales: 100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go
by Susan Van Allen
Van Allen shares intriguing details and secrets of her favorite places. The book also includes recommendations for relaxing spas, splendid gardens, and places to shop. Van Allen offers nuts and bolts information and her suggestions fit a range of budgets to make a woman’s Italian vacation dreams come true.
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1000 Ultimate Experiences
by Lonely Planet
Perfect for the eternal wanderers, armchair travelers, and listophiles alike, 1000 Ultimate Experiences showcases the most inspirational, bizarre, entertaining, and classic travel suggestions around the world.
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Life Wonders of the World: 50 Must-See Natural and Man-Made Marvels
In this new LIFE book, the editors return to the sites of the original Seven Wonders and then keep right on traveling around the globe–eventually visiting in words and pictures seven-times-seven Wonders, plus one more.
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The Way of the World
illustrated by Thierry Vernet, text by Nicolas Bouvier
In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass. They had money to last them a few months and a Fiat to take them where they were going, but above all they were equipped with the certainty that by hook or by crook they would reach their destination.
