bookpublishing

Today’s post is from guest blogger Vera Marie Badertscher. Thanks Vera for sharing your insightful words at bookpublishing.today.com. If any of my readers are interested in guest blogging, please feel free to leave a comment including the topic of your choice (related to reading, writing, or publishing, please).

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Thanks Jess, for letting me use your space to talk about books that inspire and inform travel. When I started A Traveler’s Library (http://atravelerslibrary.com) to talk about books and travel (and occasionally movies and travel), I pondered how to explain the kind of books I would be talking about.

Travelers and readers seemed to understand immediately. Most devoted travelers, I find, peruse their favorite guidebook and then ask a friend “What should I read for my trip to Spain?” Such inquiries drive long threads of discussion on travel bulletin boards on the Internet.

Bookstores do not stack books in a section called “inspire and inform travel.” Publishing companies do not assign editors to find and publish books under that category, either. Oh sure, you can find travel memoirs about people who built a house in a foreign country or guys who floated down the length of the Amazon filed under travel.

But how about the biography of Mozart that is essential reading for a trip to Salzburg, or Thucydides, who points out places you don’t want to miss on the Peloponnese, or cookbooks filled with anecdotes and photographs that show how people really live?

On my library shelves all these books wind up in the travel category.

Recently a LinkedIn acquaintance introduced me to a veteran travel writer who “gets it.” In the preface to her 1998 book Travel Here and There Anita Zelman describes a bookstore in New York that “organizes the books on the shelves the way I organize my thinking for a trip. I am no longer to be considered crazy, weird, or alone.” The owner of the store explained that his purpose “is to provide customers with a good, purposeful read before and after the trip.”

That’s it. That’s what travel books should be and do.

In case you are wondering, that bookstore still exists, in slightly different form. The Complete Traveller, An Antiquarian Bookstore (www.ctrarebooks.com), sells books in Manhattan. Amazingly, in these times that are so touch on independents, travel book sellers still exist. I listed some at A Traveler’s Library.

Happy travels to you, and happy reading.