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Food, inspiration and the new Frommer’s

WHETHER YOU’RE PLANNING a trip in the new year and need some practical advice, or you’d like to give a coffee-table book filled with inspirational photos to someone on your Christmas list, there’s a travel-themed book for you. Here are a few recently published books.

FOOD AND TRAVEL

Many travellers are passionate about food, whether it’s enjoying that perfect meal on vacation or authentic local cuisine. Travel + Leisure magazine’s Where to Eat Around the World spotlights food in 27 destinations in a coffee-table book, from the lunch canteens and taverns of Istanbul to barbecue in Texas. The mag has also come out with a 2014 calendar, “World’s Best Places”.

Lonely Planet’s The Food Book: A Journey Through the Great Cuisines of the World is a reference guide to cuisines from 47 countries with details on ingredients, dishes, drinks, eating habits, local produce, etiquette, shopping, culinary traditions and even utensils. Also from Lonely Planet, A Fork in the Road offers 34 stories from chefs from Marcus Samuelsson to Madhur Jaffrey.

FROMMER’S, FRESH

Arthur Frommer and his daughter Pauline have relaunched their guidebook enterprise with 30 new titles. The relaunch marks a new publishing chapter for the Frommers, who sold their brand to Google in 2012, then reacquired it earlier this year. “We regained the travel series on April 3 and spent the next six months working around the clock,” Frommer, 84, said in a phone interview. “I never dreamed at my age I’d be working this hard! We created freshly researched books from beginning to end,” written by authors the Frommers had worked with previously who “have devoted their lives to writing about the destination where they live.”

There are 10 new Frommer’s Day by Day guides, compact paperbacks with removeable maps, packed with everything from sample one-, two- and three-day itineraries, to recommendations for shopping, nightlife, restaurants, excursions and neighbourhood tours. The new Day by Day guides cover New York City, San Francisco, Honolulu and Oahu, Prague, London, New Orlea-ns, Paris, Rome, Boston and Philadelphia.

Frommer’s has also newly published 20 EasyGuides. “The EasyGuides create a new price point,” Frommer said. “Plenty of travel books sell for under $10 but many of them are just 40 to 60 pages long. These books are 256 pages and contain a full-size foldout waterproof map bound in the back.”

The EasyGuides cover Alaskan cruises and ports of call, Australia, Colorado, Costa Rica, France and a separate book on Paris, Hawaii, Ireland, London, Las Vegas, Madrid and Barcelona, Miami and Key West, Montreal and Quebec City, New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Walt Disney World and Orlando, and a single guide to Rome, Florence and Venice. E-book versions of all the new Frommer guides are due out in January.

DESTINATION-SPIRATION

For the armchair traveller or the vacation planner, National Geographic’s Four Seasons of Travel: 400 of the World’s Best Destinations in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall showcases destinations near and far by season.

Also from Lonely Planet is Beautiful World, a collection of stunning photos, mostly landscapes of natural phenomena, from sand dunes to icy waterfalls. Also from Lonely Planet, Best in Travel 2014 offers vacation inspiration in a paperback. For kids, Lonely Planet’s Not-For-Parents series introduces young readers to cool places from the Great Pyramid of Giza to New Zealand’s Lord of the Rings locations.

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