32 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JULY 29, 2019
Travel Books
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the
first transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland
to Ireland. In commemoration of the milestone,
Penguin Books is publishing Airline Maps
(Nov.) by design historian Mark Ovenden and
Maxwell Roberts, a lecturer in psychology at
the University of Essex. As the centennial
approached, says Terezia Cicel, assistant editor
at Viking and Penguin, it made sense for
Ovenden, whose previous books include Transit
Maps of the World and Railway Maps of the
World, to turn his attention skyward. “It’s
nostalgic and celebratory, a visual narrative of 100 years of
passenger flights.”
Airline Maps traces the rise of commercial air travel through
an illustrated collection of flight routes and the travel posters
that accompanied the nascent industry. Soon after British
aviators survived that first crash landing in Ireland, travel
guides advertising aerial journeys between London and Paris
began popping up; zooming airplanes in a 1919 illustration
featured in the book represent the newfound speed with which
travelers could span the two capitals.
A 1921 poster for Transport Aeriens Guyanais advertises a
pair of routes serviced by its fleet of five seaplanes, with an inset
map of French Guiana and an illustration of colonists standing
on the palm-lined shores of a treacherous river, looking in
wonder at planes overhead. “The ways the designers sought to
depict our planet was key to making travel attractive,” Cicel
says. “They made our world seem smaller and accessible.”
Lucinda Gosling mines similar archival material portraying
the promise and glamour of early-20th-century travel in the
social history Holidays and High Society (History Press, Oct.),
tracking how Britain’s idle rich, beginning in the late 1880s,
turned Europe’s southern coast and other locales, including
Egypt and St. Moritz, into glamorous playgrounds.Nearly every page of text is accompanied by period photo-
graphs of beaming, fashionable vacationers on sun-kissed
boulevards or illustrations taken from society magazines. The
cover of the Jan. 8, 1913, edition of the Bystander shows women
bedecked in gloves and feather-topped hats reading the society
mag along the French Riviera. Art deco ads from later editions
of the same publication tout the charms of Monte Carlo,
showing a couple in their tennis whites during the day and
elegant formal wear at night. The book was produced in
conjunction with the Mary Evans Picture Library, where Gosling
is a historical specialist.
The evolution of tourism stretching back to the 17th century
is the subject of Hugh Thomson’s The Map Tour (Carlton, Oct.),
produced in collaboration with the Royal Geographic Society.
Featuring personal accounts, such as James Boswell’s Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides, as well as photos and detailed, heavily
illustrated maps, Thomson highlights the importance of
cartography in not only delineating the world but also selling a
vision of it. Instead of maps that originated with expeditionary
treks, Thomson reproduces maps from the Society’s collection
that were intended for the traveler “who enjoyed the comforts
of an inn or the availability of a railway,” he writes in the
introduction. “These maps were designed to entice the viewer
to a known world.”Fantastic Voyages
These books portray the bygone glamour of travel
Above r.: a map produced by the Information Bureau of the Royal Afghan Embassy, 1964