ReviewTravel guide meets coffee table book – now what’s the use of that? New York Times’ A to Z of bucket-list destinations
- There’s no doubt it’s beautifully made, but this compilation guide to 150 weekend mini-vacations from The New York Times feels like one massive nostalgia trip
- We can only imagine its purpose is to remind the reader of places not yet visited, to which they can dash, mobile in hand, to snap those Instagrammable moments
The New York Times: 36 Hours World, 150 Cities from Abu Dhabi to Zurich, edited by Barbara Ireland, Taschen, 2.5/5 stars
The Codex Calixtinus is a 225-page medieval text in five volumes, with authorship attributed to 12th-century Pope Calixtus II and stored in the bowels of St James Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
Volume five is a set of instructions and advice for pilgrims walking the legendary Camino de Santiago from the French side of the Pyrenees to the final resting place of Saint James in the north west of the Iberian Peninsula. It’s what might be considered the first iteration of Lonely Planet: Europe on a Shoestring.
The codex included, in its own way, the now familiar formula: History, Getting There, What to See, What to Do, Where to Stay, even Where to Eat. And after the “Which churches make false claims to housing holy relics”, there is as much of a Nightlife section as you could ask from a 12th century pilgrim’s guide.
And for about 1,000 years, that was pretty much the format. Right up until the internet relegated travel guides to the same fate as video rental and record shops. Whispered recommendations in overnight train carriages became collated TripAdvisor star ratings, getting pleasantly lost in a new place was now metadata for Google Maps.
Woe betide having to navigate the Tokyo Metro using your own brain, having to ask a few locals for directions, which beckons that other sacred relic – the phrase book.