Globe Corner Blogs

Associated Press travel editor Beth Harpaz recently interviewed several travel experts, including Pauline Frommer and Don George, for holiday gift ideas for the traveler. Harpaz also checked in with the Globe Corner Travel Annex at Brookline Booksmith to see what we suggested. You can read the full article here, but what follows are a few of the titles culled for this season’s travel gift books. For even more recommendations, check out the travel section of our Holiday Gift Guide here.

National Geographic’s World’s Best Travel Experiences

Popular actor and award-winning travel writer Andrew McCarthy writes the foreword to this lavish book, offering 400 awe-inspiring destinations chosen by National Geographic’s family of globe-trotting contributors; dozens of fun, “Best of the World” themed lists; illuminating sidebars, several by travel and literary luminaries such as Anna Quindlen, Bill Bryson, Gore Vidal, and Pico Iyer; and hundreds of dazzling, oversized, full-color images to bring to life a wide variety of location categories–from entire countries to mountaintop villages to pristine lakes to ancient wonders. This broad, general interest travel title will appeal to active travelers looking for the next great trip as well as to the many readers who simply love dreaming of visiting far-flung, idyllic destinations, and for those who love to be “in the know” of the next travel trend.

Lonely Planet’s Food Lovers’ Guide to the World

The world is your oyster. Or hot dog. Or camembert. When we travel, it s often love at first bite.” Food Lover s Guide to the World” presents a lifetime of eating experiences that will lead you from one end of the globe to the other. Take your taste buds on a tour around the world and cook up you next great culinary adventure. Includes celebrity food-lover contributions, best places to find local dishes in cities great and small, cultural tips and how-to-eat etiquette, introductions by Mark Bittman and James Oseland, and more than 50 recipes to cook back home.

 The Longest Way Home
by Andrew McCarthy

With an irrepressible taste for adventure, candor, and a vivid sense of place, award-winning travel writer and actor Andrew McCarthy takes us on a deeply personal journey played out amid some of the world’s most evocative locales. Unable to commit to his fiancÉe of nearly four years—and with no clear understanding of what’s holding him back—Andrew McCarthy finds himself at a crossroads, plagued by doubts that have clung to him for a lifetime. Something in his character has kept him always at a distance, preventing him from giving himself wholeheartedly to the woman he loves and from becoming the father that he knows his children deserve. So before he loses everything he cares about, Andrew sets out to look for answers.

Among the Islands
by Tim Flannery

Tim Flannery is one of the world’s most influential scientists, credited with discovering more species than Darwin. In Among the Islands Flannery recounts a series of expeditions he made at the dawn of his career to the strange tropical islands of the South Pacific, a great arc stretching nearly 4,000 miles from the postcard perfection of Polynesia to some of the largest, highest, ancient, and most rugged islands on earth.

Better than Fiction
Don George, ed.

A collection of original travel stories told by some of the world s best novelists, including: Isabel Allende, Peter Matthiessen, Alexander McCall Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, Tea Obreht, and DBC Pierre.

The Travels of Marco Polo

The newest volume in Sterling Signature’s successful Illustrated Edition series takes readers on a fascinating journey into a world once unknown. Marco Polo almost single-handedly introduced fourteenth-century Europe to the civilizations of Central Asia and China. Now this stunningly illustrated volume, edited by renowned historian Morris Rossabi, offers the complete text of Polo’s travelogue (in the respected Yule-Cordier translation), enhanced with more than 200 images–including illuminated manuscripts, paintings, photographs, and maps. Sidebars and dozens of informative footnotes combine to present Polo and his travels in a captivating new light.

Crumpled City Maps

These maps will fit snugly in the toe of any stocking and you don’t have to worry about messing up the creases! Crumpled City maps are made with 100% water proof crump-able paper that you can stuff into your pocket and go! Read more here.

Pictures from Italy
by Charles Dickens

Pictures from Italy is one of Charles Dickens’ earlier works, a fantastic and whimsical foray into the twin worlds of travel and the imagination. Inspired by his words, Italian artist Livia Signorini plays with Dickens’ sense of place, memory, and politics. The result is a brilliant contemporary dialogue with his work — a reading of history, time, and change — that renews our sense of his enduring vision. An extraordinary work that is as much about travel writing as it is about Dickens’ journey to Italy itself, this handsome volume features 11 full-color gate folds and will appeal to fans of the Victorian novel, travel buffs, and art lovers alike.

Gross America: Your Coast to Coast Guide to All Things Gross
by Richard Faulk

Take a road trip through Gross America! Gross America is a coast-to-coast catalog of the most grandly gross science experiments, beautifully bizarre art, and delightfully disgusting historical sites that America has to offer. Part travel atlas, part trivia guide, Gross America presents these United States as you’ve never seen them before—weird, wonderful, strange, and totally, utterly gross.

I love walking through the travel aisle and finding a customer standing transfixed in front of our map browser, gazing at the brilliant colors of our Tyvek map, contemplating the World Upside Down, or pointing out a memory of a place on a map to a friend. Maps draw people in, ask for interaction, reflection, or simply admiration. While I walk by our browser fifty times a day, I gained a new appreciation for the art of cartography this past week at two different venues: the Boston Antiquarian Book Festival and the new map room at the Boston Public Library.

Walking through the rows upon rows of ancient and beautiful books, prints, and maps at the Antiquarian Book Festival at Hynes Convention Center, it was my turn to gawk. I squeezed between two tweed suits, through a cloud of must, and stood staring at the familiar shape of my home state. A German 1955 map of Iowa hung before me, surrounded by maps that showed our states divided into territories–a visual history lesson. I passed one map so old it depicted California as an island. I’d seen a similar map at the Boston Public the week before when I finally made it to the new Map Room there.

If you haven’t visited the Norman B. Leventhal Map Room, check it out on your next trip to the BPL. When I went, it was election week, and the walls were covered in red and blue U.S. maps, with plaques explaining the electoral college. I read the plaques; it still confuses me, but this was no fault of the exhibition. The current exhibit focuses on Boston’s public spaces. As you enter the map room there is a gorgeous mural of downtown Boston, overlooking the State House and Common. Inside, you can learn about the development of your favorite greens around town.

If you or someone you know is also an appreciator of the map as art, come check out the amazing travel-oriented gift books we have on display at Booksmith. From the Granger Collection we have a gorgeous book of Historic Maps and Views of Boston. After perusing these historic views of your favorite city, check out Mark Ovenden’s new Railway Maps of the World, which I happen to have on my coffee table at home. From Kim Je-hwan’s dizzying design of the Tokyo Metropolitan Railway System to a map of the United States covered with an intricate system hairline cracks that was the world’s largest railroad network at its peak in 1918, this book will stun, absorb, and amaze your guests.

And finally, when you’ve completely saturated yourself with these visual masterpieces,
pick up Robert D. Kaplan’s Revenge of Geography. Kaplan examines the history of the world through the lens of the map, exploring how climate changes, topography, and proximity all contributed to major events in the shaping of world history. All of these books make great holiday gifts, especially when paired with that tube-shaped package that can only be the wall map on their list.

While wandering through the Globe Corner Travel aisle at Booksmith this past week, you may have been drawn in, distracted, or blinded by a display of hot pink books. Could someone please tell me why India again and again gets classified as hot pink? From the Wallpaper Guide and the Love Guide to Delhi, to The Three Sisters Indian Cookbook, to Siddhartha Deb’s new book The Beautiful and the Damned, when it comes to India, book designers seem always to “think pink” (I spent Hurricane Sandy re-watching Funny Face).

Pink or not, if you’re looking for literature to guide you into India, we’ve got it. Our newest title on the Destination: India shelf is Aman Sethi’s A Free Man: A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi. Sethi is a young up-and-coming Indian journalist who delivers the fascinating narrative of Mohammed, a homeless man in Old Delhi. His book is endorsed by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, whose own book vividly evokes life in a slum near Mumbai. A different kind of underworld is explored by Suketu Mehta in Maximum City, a narrative that takes the reader from the lives of Hindu gangs in Bombay to behind the scenes of Bollywood.

If you didn’t catch Shuchi’s review of William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (another pink book!!), scroll down or click here to
read about her travels to San Francisco to celebrate Ganesha’s birthday by sending him overboard on a journey from San Francisco Bay to his home on Mount Kailash. We recently got Dalrymple’s travel writing collected into a series of portraits of India in The Age of Kali. Dalrymple visits little-known areas of the subcontinent in his search for Kali Yug, an “age of darkness” prophesied by Hindu cosmology.

In addition to our vast array of Indian literature and travel narratives, we’ve got the guidebooks to help you get there. Whether you’re a solo backpacker looking for the Lonely Planet, or what Fiona Caulfield, author of our India Love Guides, calls a “luxury vagabond,” we’ve got the right guide for you. To read more about the enchanting India Love Guides, click here, or come browse our Destination of the Month display at Booksmith. You can’t miss it–just think pink.

Booksmith was back at the fourth annual Boston Book Festival this past weekend. Luckily the hurricane held off so we didn’t have to fight the winds and rains, and instead enjoyed a crisp, sunny autumn day. For those of you who didn’t make it to Copley Square to wander among the publisher, bookseller, and all-things-book-related booths or to attend one of the author panels, we were parked just outside of Trinity Church, sharing the  main circus tent with Information and WBUR. We had the privilege of selling books for the authors speaking at Trinity’s two venues. Those of you who stopped by to say hello or browse our tables would have seen stacks upon stacks of–among others–Junot Diaz’s latest This is How You Lose Her, Brookline’s own Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision, Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, and a pile of books resembling bricks of gold (and weighing almost as much)–that was Eric Kandel’s Age of Insight, a beautiful hardcover with Klimt’s “Golden Phase” on the cover, which sold out after his event.

In fact, we sold out of many of our books in the charged atmosphere of the festival, as readers met their author idols and shared their favorite reads. It’s this particular atmosphere that makes me excited to work the book festival each year. I love wandering among the booths and seeing all of the organizations that make up my writing and reading life in Boston. Everyone around me is, in some form or another, a reader. Don’t get me wrong, Booksmith is full of book-loving customers, but at the book festival, there’s a particular eagerness to the readers that come by our booth. They’re excited about the ideas they just heard, the free book bag they just won, or the prospect of getting a copy of their book signed in person. It’s more than eager–there’s something earnest about these readers, which instantly endears me to them.

That’s why I was so sorry to disappoint one young man who came out of Junot Diaz’s event looking for Diaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I had to tell him we had just sold our last copy. He looked at me, stunned. “Are there any bookstores in the area?” he cried desperately. I couldn’t think of any close by. “How long will Diaz be signing?” he asked. We both looked at the long line of readers, stretching out of the tent as far as we could see. “I think he’ll be here for awhile,”  I guessed.

Not more than thirty minutes later, Diaz was still signing, and the customer was back. “I made it!” he cried, dripping with sweat, completely out of breath, and triumphantly holding up a rather worn copy of Oscar Wao. He told me he had run home three miles to get his copy of the book so Diaz could sign it. I watched him proudly join the end of the now-dwindling line, and when, a few minutes later, I looked up, I saw Diaz congratulate the runner with a hug before signing his book.

As autumn breaks over us in rain showers and shivery weather, we’ve been transitioning from back to school to scary Halloween reads at Booksmith. Aside from seasonal changes, you might notice a few other shifts in our store: we’ve brought cookbooks up front and moved the cozy Writer’s Corner to a new nook. We’ve organized our art books into beautiful displays I can barely walk past without pausing to browse. And in the travel section, we’ve dedicated a shelf to a new Destination of the Month. This October at the Globe Corner Travel Annex, we’re traveling to Prague.

I’m still not sure why I decided that Prague would be our first destination. Perhaps it was simply that the one time I had the privilege to travel there was in the month of October. My memories of the city are bathed in the crimson and gold leaves of the rolling hills and rust-colored rooftops. I recall crisp October mornings on Charles Bridge, the warm rays of an autumnal sun causing the statues along the bridge to cast long shadows. If anyone is traveling to Prague, here is my tip: No matter how many pubs you visit, do what it takes to rise early on at least one morning to make it to the Charles Bridge before 8am, before the vendors set up their wares and the crowds cover the thoroughfare. The silent beauty and austerity of the city at that early hour made a vivid impression on me that has not faded.

The memory returns every time I pick up Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, and not just because the bridge is  featured on the cover, effectively inviting the reader to cross into its imagined world. “A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop,” writes Kundera. Another absolutely essential must-read for anyone traveling to the Czech Republic is the late Vaclav Havel. The playwright-who-became-president inspired many with his wise The Art of the Impossible, and we’ve got his most recent To the Castle and Back on display, right next to Bohumil Hrabal’s classic I Served the King of England.

In addition to our wide array of guidebooks to the city, we’ve culled an impressive collection of Czech literature that includes not only the Complete Stories of Kafka, which my husband is currently reading and highly recommending and making me listen to David Rakoff’s spoof on The Metamorphosis (which you can also listen to here), but also Gustave Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka, which I cannot praise highly enough for its wit and wisdom. Janouch was an 18-year-old aspiring writer when he joined his mentor Kafka on walks around Prague, discoursing on matters both philosophical and commonplace.

Some perhaps lesser-known titles you will find on our Destination Prague shelf include Josef Skvorecky’s novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, a comic and
insightful journey of a Czech immigrant professor in Toronto. Travel writer Bruce Chatwin tells the story of Utz, a fictional Czech art collector who is tied to the Communist state by his affection for his ceramic collection, stored in a Prague apartment. And finally, our newest Czech title, Petr Kral’s In Search of the Essence of Place explores the domestic spaces of a home to the larger scenes of village life in the Czech Republic. The title itself perhaps embodies the purpose of our new Destination of the Month best: to bring together a rich variety of voices and guides that can help the traveler discover the essence of a particular destination.

I’d been to Providence before. Once on a class assignment to interview author Rosemary Mahoney—who spends her time between Providence and Greece, and twice for the annual Waterfire festival, during which enormous torches in the midst of the river are lit while gondolas cruise the sparkling waters and spectators roam the river walk, enjoying good food, live music, performances, and dancing. But no matter what my purpose in Providence is, the arrival is always the same. Upon stepping out of the train station the first thing I see is the bone white dome of the Capital, looming over the quaint town. And, engraved beneath the dome, the words that always seem to capture the spirit of Providence: To hold forth a lively experiment…

On this particular afternoon, Providence was not exactly the picture of liveliness; the sky was overcast and a mist hung over the quiet streets. To find sparks of life, I had to make my way downtown to the convention center, where the annual conference of the New England Independent Booksellers was already underway.

I arrived in time for a panel discussion on selling maps in bookstores. Booksmith’s general manager Dana Brigham starred on the panel, along with National Geographic’s Mike Dyer, Eileen Osteen from Michelin Maps, and James Leniart, the creative talent behind stylish Red Maps, soon to be carried by Booksmith. The audience was mostly composed of booksellers from around New England, curious about what you might call Booksmith’s newest “lively experiment”: over the summer we increased our travel section by over 2,000 new titles, including a wide selection of both folded and wall maps.

One of the best parts about NEIBA is the camaraderie, encouragement, and affirmation gained from a gathering of booksellers all trying to stay afloat in an industry that is constantly competing with the newest e-reader or corporate monster in online book sales. In such a setting, it might be easy to become discouraged by all the challenges bookstores face in today’s economy. So it was a relief to hear from experts in the travel industry that in fact, map sales are up.

“Can this really be true?” an incredulous bookseller asked the panel, “that despite GPS and all the mapping applications available, people are still buying paper maps?” The answer was an overwhelming affirmative. No one wants to be caught out hiking or on a lonely country road with only an electronic device that may fail them. Everyone likes an atlas in the car, and the comfort of a folded map in their pocket.

“People coming into bookstores are generally print people,” Dana offered, “So they are also going to be interested in the aesthetic of paper maps.” One particular aesthetic on display was James Leniart’s Red Maps, beautifully designed specialty maps which unfold in the handy accordion-style to reveal a colorful array of streets and sites printed across durable and wonderfully textured paper. Art for the urban explorer.

For those of us still worried about print book sales, there was the encouragement of the speakers at the Author Breakfast the next day: James Dashner, Dennis Lehane, Lisa Genova, and Junot Diaz. Each writer spoke to their particular process of becoming a writer, and all ended up affirming the role of booksellers in that process.

Lehane and Diaz both came from working class immigrant families where reading literature was an anomaly. Diaz described finding an advertisement for “Free Books” in the classified section of a paper he was delivering when he was ten years old. He called up the elderly woman across town, scouted the route, and coerced his older brother into helping him swipe a few shopping carts to schlepp the books home.

It was the first time he could remember everything working out for him, Diaz told the room full of booksellers. He then deftly turned the touching story into a metaphor for the long and arduous process of getting a book from its composition stage through the publishing industry, into bookstores, and finally, into the hands of a reader.

After breakfast, it was onto the trade show floor, for a day of more rewarding exchanges between booksellers, writers, and publishers about the newest titles and the best ways to get them into the world. For me, the trade show began with a conversation with our map distributor about our new destination of the month at Booksmith, and ended with consuming free pink frosted cupcakes with events director Jamie, at the Scholastic table in honor of Clifford’s birthday.

After day one of NEIBA, my husband joined me in Providence for dinner. We were crossing the river, heading toward Brown’s student district, when we ran into Eileen and James, participants on the map panel. “I’m trying to find a taxi,” James told us. “I need to get to the train station to get back to New York.” We wished him luck, only to realize a few blocks later that the station was, as most things are in Providence, within walking distance. “Why didn’t he walk?” my husband wondered.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “Maybe he needed a map.”

“Tut, Tut! Miss Lucy!” Eleanor Lavish cries in E.M Forster’s A Room with a View, “I hope we shall soon emancipate you from your Baedeker.” Lavish confiscates the innocent Lucy Honeychurch’s guide to Italy, perhaps leading her to look for a cicerone in other places, such as in the young George Emerson.

Baedeker travel guides were first published in Germany in 1830 by Karl Baedeker, whose sons and grandsons later took over the business, continuing the trusted voice that led Europeans into unknown lands. Baedeker’s were not the earliest guidebooks, in fact, John Murray’s Handbooks served as a prototype for them, but they soon became Europe’s favorite chaperon.

To “baedeker” eventually became a synonym for “to travel,” and when, in the spring of 1942, Germany began a series of attacks on particularly picturesque English towns, the siege became known as the “Baedeker Blitz” because it was thought that the targeted cities were picked from Baedeker’s guide to Britain. Baedeker’s had by then come up with the star system (introduced in 1846), assigning a number of stars to cities not to be missed. Those assigned two or more star’s in Baedeker’s Britain were bombed. The British responded by bombing Leipzig in 1943, destroying much of the Baedeker publishing house.

For those of you who thought Baedeker guides were a thing of the past, think again. This historic line of guide books was relaunched in 2005 in Germany, and are now available not only in the United States, but at your local bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.

While the appearance has changed since the first solid red Baedekers (there is now a blue stripe across the top and a nice full color photo of each destination on the cover), these guides are still crammed full of information, both practical and interesting. Each guide contains a Facts section, which includes a generous amount of literary and cultural history, politics, and geographic information; a Basics section, which keeps you up to date on accommodation, language, literature, etiquette, and food; there is a small section on suggested Tours, and a large alphabetical listing of Sights, complete with color photographs and stunning fold-outs, such as one of the Saga Museum in Iceland that actually made my co-worker Natasha squeal. In addition, each guide comes with a great city or country map tucked into its protective plastic cover.

Come check out our new selection of Baedekers at Booksmith, covering destinations from Paris to Sri Lanka. With our new Globe Corner Travel Annex at Booksmith crammed full of travel books and maps, you’ll never have to be emancipated from your favorite guidebook.

A few weeks ago, I had a work dream. You know, the kind of dream with not quite enough monsters to qualify as a nightmare but which nevertheless extends your eight-hour work day into the wee hours of the morning. Luckily, I work in the travel department at Booksmith, so while some of my work dreams have me shelving for 12 hours straight, other times I get to slip off into an unknown land I glimpsed on the cover of a guide during the day.

On this night I dreamed I was sorting through some folded maps at Booksmith. But instead of dividing the White Mountain National Park maps from the Green National Park maps, as I had during the work day, in my dream I was sorting National Geographic’s new line of “Maps to Marriage.” The bride’s maps were white, and the groom’s–green.

This dream may not come as a surprise to those of you who know I eloped to Europe last month and returned to Booksmith a married woman. We conceived of our elopement as a Voyage Out, after Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which is at once a travelogue about a group of British citizens adventuring in South America, and the story of a young girl’s initiation into life and love.

Travel, I discovered over the past few weeks of strolling the boulevards of Paris, hiking in the French Alps, and gazing over the red tiled roofs at the Tagus from the top of one of Lisbon’s seven hills–is the perfect metaphor for marriage: a dreamscape of new discoveries difficult to map, unpredictable, and sometimes startling, but always full of the potential for new life for the way it brings us out of our individual habits of being and plunges us into new encounters with the other: be that a new  language, landscape, or lover.

So go find your traveling partner, book your flights, and we’ll supply the maps.

Countless times customers come into the bookstore asking for a book they heard on NPR, only they forgot the author…and the title. I usually enjoy the challenge of tracking down the book based on the strains of story the customer picked up on their morning commute or over lunch break. Sometimes, however, the search is in vain, the sound byte too short.

So if you heard the Globe Corner Travel Annex at Brookline Booksmith mentioned on your local WBUR station over the past few days, but didn’t quite catch the full range of travel resources we now have on hand at Booksmith, we’re here to fill you in and make sure you’re prepared for your next destination.

If that destination happens to be one of our country’s grand national parks, Lonely Planet has several guides to take you through the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks. These books have everything you need to explore, from detailed mountain hikes to cycling paths, nature and wildlife to watch for, and information on accommodations, including camping.

Want to leave the country without going overseas? Our neighbors to the north are waiting with open hands. But don’t go with empty hands, pick up one of our Moon Handbooks for Montreal and Quebec, Nova Scotia, and even the Canadian Rockies.

If you’re in the Boston area, we’ve got National Geographic Trail maps for the Boston Harbor Islands and Cape Cod–the perfect place to spend the upcoming holiday.

And for those of you lucky enough to be traveling to Europe this summer, check out Rick Steve’s guides to European countries, including the Rick Steve’s pocket guides to cities such as Paris, Rome, and Athens. These books are full of trip planning and touring advice you do not want to be without.

Looking forward to seeing you at Brookline Booksmith’s Globe Corner Travel Annex. Happy Travels.

Ever since I finished Cheryl Strayed’s new book Wild, about her journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, I have been craving a good long hike. I can get caught up in the routine of urban life, thinking my walk to work is exercise enough, my pause by the Charles River a sufficient enough breath of nature to get me through. I forget what a good hike can do, until a book like Strayed’s or a brilliant summer day reminds me: I’m due for a hike. 

Luckily I have two spectacular mountain ranges within reach: the Green and White Mountains. And luckily, we have a plethora of National Geographic Trail Maps to guide me to my next day hike. Just unfolding one of these maps makes my feet ache to hit the trails.  

If you’re Boston-bound but still craving a hike, take heart, or rather, Take a Hike, Boston, the title of Moon Guide’s latest trail guide for the Boston area. Look to Moon Handbooks to guide you into your next summer destination in North, Central, or South America, be it to a beach in Cancun or the wilds of Glacier National Park. 

Traveling with kids? Check out Lonely Planet’s new travel series geared specifically toward young travelers. The Not For Parents guides, available for London, New York, Rome, and Paris, are filled with brilliant graphics, photos, and illustrations along with information and tips aimed to engage children with their new surroundings. 

You may have heard these guidebooks mentioned on your local NPR station recently. We’re excited to be part of your summer plans, bringing you the latest and best in travel guidebooks and maps at our new Globe Corner Travel Annex at Brookline Booksmith. Happy Travels.