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How many stores can your nose recognize? Back when Amazon was just located in South America, I spent my weekends in musty old used bookstores looking for copies of National Geographic magazines and maps. When I get an old book and carefully open its foxed pages, I always think about those summer days reading the magazines in the back of a shop.
Like many National Geographic collectors, there would come a day when the wife/parents/landlord couldn’t accept the piles of yellow-bordered soft covers and they would need to be ditched. It was my parents that caused my collection to end up in front of the local library. I had amassed a collection of every issue from April 1997 (the current issue at the time) all the way back to 1932. Although a box or two of the old ones escaped donation, I still think about how cool it would be to have bookshelves filled with those golden global guides.
Now I’ve moved onto other musty guides: travel guidebooks from the turn of the century. I have a modest collection (under 100) that takes up a few shelves in my apartment. I’m pretty sure my place smells like a used bookstore because of them, but I don’t mind. It’s the smell of my teens, a time when I could only dream of travel.
Scott Brown, editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine, has recently written a great article over at AbeBooks.com straight-forwardly entitled Collecting Travel Guides. In the article, he hits upon the history some of the elderly forefathers of travel guides - Baedeker, Cook, Locke, Fodor - and shows some of the more sought-after ephemera including a “Biedermeier” Baedeker from 1852 which is currently available for sale on AbeBooks for a measely US$4,370.00. I can hear you grabbing for your credit card now.
I chuckled a little at a line from the article:
“As always in book collecting, condition affects the price, but since guidebooks were intended to be used while traveling, collectors tend to be more forgiving of wear.”
I think I’m more forgiving than most. Check out the article here when you get a free moment.
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I acquired a “new” guidebook today: a 1911 copy of Baedeker’s London and Its Environs. The previous owner went wild marking the book and I love ‘em for it. Due to the nature of the marginalia in the book, I’m calling the previous owner “The Art Lover.” Most of the markings are underlinings in pencil, […]
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There are a group of Nova Scotians who proudly live in the northern Highlands of Cape Breton. They are the descendants of the Scots who arrived hundreds of years ago. My friend from nearby Asby Bay said that two families living in Meat Cove, the northern-most land of Nova Scotia, have been feuding for years. […]
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A little sand from the beach, a pocket of coins, a clump of moss… it is the little ordinary objects I come in contact with on my journeys that seem to find themselves returning home with me. These relics become physical connections to memories made on my trip. A vial of sand from […]
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I visited a friend in Nova Scotia for a week earlier this month. The excuse to visit her and her Canadian providence was to teach her high school art class a little about photography. She could have simply asked if I wanted to go up there to take our her trash and I’d […]
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I am spending the weekend preparing for a trip to Nova Scotia, Canada where I’ll be visiting a friend I haven’t seen since 2004. We met while backpacking through Croatia and have kept in touch ever since through e-mail. She invited me to teach her high school class a bit about photography, so […]
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Have you ever read a quote that stopped you in your tracks? A quote that made you look up from the text and ponder it a bit? I found one of those quotes today while reading an article on Outside Online.
“I’ve tried to make the rest of my life good enough that even […]
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Today felt a bit like Christmas with two separate orders arriving on the same day. I received a box from Amazon after waiting patiently for three weeks. It contained the book Closeup Shooting: A Guide to Closeup, Tabletop and Macro Photography by Cyrill Harnischmacher and the BBC-produced documentary 2-disc DVD, Life in the […]
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I recently purchased some Kenko Extension Tubes for my Canon 40d and thought I’d write a mini photographic review. The set comes with 12mm, 20mm, and 36mm extensions, all made of quality plastic with metal connection mounts. Extension tubes allows photographers to focus closer than the lens’ normal minimum focal length. In other […]
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A lot of sweat went into the following photos. I huffed it up the Sam Merrill Trail in Altadena only to find out that I forgot to pack a memory card. Realizing that I had them in the car, I hurried down and back up again in time to catch the last of […]
