"Page after page of vintage photography and lettering, this is an astounding book like no other, drawing us back in time to a world before digital cameras and photography, when each journey and voyage was recorded by hand...I'm having so much fun looking at each page — this is armchair traveling at its best."
— Fiveandahalf.net
Snapshots, passenger lists, itineraries, and postcards from San Francisco flapper Vera Talbot's Far East adventure. Chicagoan Clara E. Whitcomb's travel diary containing pages filled with souvenir photos, maps, and a list of titles for a future book about her travels in Egypt. These are only two of the narratives that unfold in the beautifully designed pages of Around the World. From Cairo to Burma and back again, authors Barbara Levine and Kirsten Jensen transport readers back to the dawn of world travel when, Brownie cameras in tow, the middle class toured the world for the first time and painstakingly documented their discoveries within scrapbooks, diary entries, and pasted-on souvenir postcards.
Around the World traces the development of the travel photo album, from primarily narrative forms—ships' logs and diaries—into rich multimedia objects of sublime beauty. The book features a wealth of turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographs and ephemera such as passports, ship menus, calling cards, and newspaper clippings. Around the World evokes the pleasures of a time when the surroundings were taken in slowly and travel was an art in and of itself.