In the candy-hued series of travel guides curated and published by Portland, Ore., graphic designer Kaie Wellman, there are no dutiful descriptions of natural history museums, no boilerplate on how to get to and from the airport, or where to cash a check.
Instead, Wellman’s eat.shop guides (www.eatshopguides.com) – begun in 2003 in her native Portland, but now spreading to cities as far afield as Paris – are aimed at people who believe shopping is recreation.
Once, the travel publishing market was dominated by sober guides such as Baedeker’s, and the appearance of travel-on-a-shoestring guides like Lonely Planet and Let’s Go in the 1960s and ’70s seemed like a revolution.
But these days, travel guides are under assault from the Internet, where armchair warriors swap tips in an ever-expanding universe of sites. Even stalwarts such as Fodor’s and Frommer’s are trying to reinvent themselves against an onslaught of new series.
To compete, the market is breaking down into ever-more specialized segments, including perhaps the fastest growing, a clutch of guides such as Wellman’s aimed at the 20-, 30- and 40-somethings who spend their weekends cooing over the produce at the farmers’ market and browsing for irony-tinged antiques.
In Wellman’s guides – 110,000 in print, 75 percent of which, she estimates, have been sold – she sticks to small locally owned stores: a Persian ice-cream parlor in Hollywood, a designer toy store in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, or Japanese tapas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A Parsons School of Design graduate and a former art director at Motown Records, Wellman chooses 45 stores and 45 restaurants for each guide, updating the selection for every edition, photographing the bits of a store’s inventory that catch her eye, or the menu items that interest her, such as coconut-curry tomato shooters in Austin, Texas, or black leather driving gloves in Chicago. The books cost $9.95 to $11.95, with prices varying according to each city.
“I am not so much interested in whether the place is the hippest in town, or whether everyone in the world has reviewed it, as whether the owner has a strong point of view, presented in a compelling package. I can feel it the moment I walk into a place, how much the owners believe in what they do,” she said, over tea and scones at an out-of-the-way tea emporium in Portland.
From its Portland roots, the series has expanded up and down the West Coast before venturing east to Brooklyn, and is scheduled to expand to Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, Rhode Island and Paris this fall.
Jen Leo, a travel book editor who runs the travel publishing Web site www.writtenroad.com, said she thinks such books are filling a distinct niche.
“I’d say the market is hungry for something like this,” Leo said. “Travelers are looking beyond the basic hotel and popular restaurant – they are looking for a different angle on why they tour a city.”
However, such books can also give off a distinctly insider-y, too-cool-for-school vibe. One Seattle newspaper, for instance, chided Wellman for the “picks that are not at the plebeian price point we usually frequent.”
The Business Times of Singapore, though, dubbed the books handy for fashionistas, saying of the L.A. guide: “Forget Rodeo Drive. Wellman has scoured Los Angeles for only the cool and eclectic for her book. She is especially interested in the smaller, independently owned shops which carry exquisite, chic and/or fun stuff – in short, all the aesthetic stuff we’d love to have.”
Dannielle Romano, the editor-at-large of DailyCandy.com, a daily email newsletter with cheery tips about what to do, see and buy, said there’s no sign yet of saturation in the category.
“It speaks to the desire for busy people with good taste to have edited information about a certain place,” she said. “There are plenty of travel guides that will tell you what the currency is, or what taxi to take. But I want to know that, like, when I go to the Four Seasons in Budapest, a guy named Gregory is the best masseuse and if you ask nicely, he will do a special trick with ice – little things like that.”
Alan Davis, the publisher of the Pulse Guide series, traced the market’s growth to census figures that show Americans are waiting longer to get married. Single travelers are looking for more in a city than traditional, family-friendly destinations, he said.
“It’s not just good enough to go out for a nice meal,” Davis said. “It has to be a total experience – people are collecting experiences.”
Sampling the guides
At the request of the Associated Press, author Kaie Wellman has whittled down a list of her top two shopping and eating locales in a handful of the cities where eat.shop guides are published, complete with her description of what makes each of these places so compelling:
Eat – Navarre: Passionate cooking in perfect proportions. (www.eatnavarre.com – Web site not complete)
Shop – Hail Mary: Groovy mosaic portraitures. (www.marytapogna.com)
Eat – Baguette Box: Vietnamese style sandwiches with a modern twist – yum. (www.baguettebox.com)
Shop – Schmancy: A teeny, tiny store stuffed with groovy toys and urban vinyl. (www.schmancytoys.com)
Eat – Loteria Grill: Why I go to the Farmers Market – droolable regional Mexican. (www.loteriagrill.com – site still under construction)
Shop – Ige: Chic asian-inspired design. (www.igedesign.com)
Eat – Blue Plate: Modern comfort food of which I dream. (www.blueplatesf.com)
Shop – Egg &The Urban Mercantile: A great urban lifestyle store. (www.urbanmercantile.com)
Eat – Boggy Creek Farm: The most beautiful organic produce I’ve ever seen. (www.boggycreekfarm.com)
Shop – By George: Every piece of clothing they sell, I want to own. (www.bygeorgeaustin.com)
Eat – Hot Doug’s: Duck fat french fries – I say no more. (www.hotdougs.com)
Shop – Scout: My brother picks up his “urban antiques” here and insists this is the coolest store in the universe. (www.scoutchicago.com)
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