#guidebooks

[vintagecamping]

The Backpacker guidebook by Albert Saijo

Published 1972

[newyorkthegoldenage]

So You’re Visiting New York by Clara E. Laughlin, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939, dust jacket illustrator unknown

Native New Yorker Clara E. Laughlin (1873-1941) has an interesting authorial life story. Unless you’ve read her autobiography, it is one that is as unknown as she is today to modern audiences.

Laughlin’s first magazine story was published when she was only 14 years old. Without attending college, at age 18, Laughlin was appointed the literary editor of The Interior Magazine a religious weekly. She soon after became an author of novels, also cutting her teeth in history, profiles, and home and etiquette books. During her youth she traveled extensively. She worked with famed author James Whitcomb Riley on his book The Golden Year (1898) and struck up a lifelong friendship with him.

Laughlin hit upon a winning franchise in her writing career after she returned to France towards the end of World War I and saw first-hand the destruction of the country from the conflict. Because of her sympathetic books about Foch (1918) and The Martyred Towns of France (1919) she was a made a member of The French Legion of Honor in 1923. Enchanted with Europe and especially France with its colorful history, customs and people, she began writing pamphlets at the request of friends of how to plan a summer in Europe with an insider’s perspective.

At the urging of a book department manager at a large Chicago store, Laughlin was urged to write a dynamic guide book to Paris. In 1924 after much rejection from publisher after publisher, So You’re Going to Paris! and if I Were Going With You These Are the Things I’d Invite You To Do was published by Houghton Mifflin. It was a success and Laughlin became a 20th century Baedeker in her own right, writing travelogues to places all over the world starting with the title: So You’re Going to or So You’re Visiting: Scandinavia, England, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Rome, etc. All this success occurred after she was fifty years old. The series did not make her wealthy but enabled her to do what she loved best, to travel and then write about it.

Text & Photo: Stuff Nobody Cares About

[vintagemalapicolla]

Nostalgic camping

[posthumanwanderings]

[nectro250]

Quick Draw #3 Guidebooks

(Day 15: Guidebook)

📔📕📗📘

Tour guides, handy tips, legends, repairs, and a spellbook.

These are the guidebooks to look at.

[picturebookshelf]

Little Big Planet: Ultimate Official Guidebook (2012)

Text and Art: Unknown

[unofskylanderspages]

Did you know? In the English version of "Skylanders Trap Team: Master Eon's Official Guide," on page 162, there's an error where instead of giving a description for 'Chapter 16: The Golden Desert', it actually re-uses the description for 'Chapter 12: Time Town.' The page also features the grammatical error in using "Mags's," rather than "Mags'."

[uwmspeccoll]

Milestone Monday

On this day, October 17 in 1965, the 1964–65 New York World's Fair closed after two years and more than 51 million attendees. In commemoration, we offer a few pages from our copy of the Official Guide to the Fair. Seeing this guide is very nostalgic for me. As a child, my family lived only 30 minutes from the fairgrounds, so we were among the 51 million and visited the fair several times. I was most excited to see the life-sized dinosaur models. Before the fair opened, the fiberglass models were transported by open-air barge down the Hudson and up the East River and finally to Flushing Meadows on October 15, 1963. That was four days after my 7th birthday, so as a present my uncle Manny took me to Astoria Park in Queens to watch the barge and its mighty dinosaurs float by. It was quite literally an awesome experience!

Besides the dinosaurs, my favorite attractions were the Pepsi-Cola “It’s a Small World” Disney ride, the space park, the underground house, Michelangelo’s La Pietà at the Vatican Pavilion (although I was only 8, I found it oddly fascinating), and of course the Unisphere, which still gives me thrills when I see it today. The fair’s closing was bittersweet for me, as its ending came six days after my 9th birthday, but as a present my parents took me to the fair one last time and I got to say goodbye to all my favorite attractions. It was a little sad, but mainly it was still magical.

View other Milestone Monday posts.

-- MAX, Head, Special Collectons