From  Herman Melville’s first whaling voyage in 1841, from New York to Liverpool, to Jack Kerouac’s on-the-road Odyssey, which is now an iconic drive, discover how these journeys imprinted themselves on some of the greatest literary minds of all time.

Complete with navigational notes, colour photographs and commissioned maps, the fresh insights within tell readers something new about the places, work and personalities of some of the world’s greatest minds.

Embark on an armchair expedition across nations and marvel at astounding spots only ever stumbled upon by chance. The profound histories and distinctive quirks of these happenstances are described in detail alongside evocative black and white photographs.

The unexpected places include:
 

• Just Enough Room Island, an aptly named islet that defies spatial conventions
• The Purple Rock of Madeira, where shipwrecked lovers etched their love story into the annals of history
• The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered one day by a wayward goat on a meandering path, guiding its keeper to unravel the mysteries of the past
• Vaseline, where the product that has become a household staple was accidentally discovered

Discover destinations both infamous and unknown, where haphazard means have conspired to shape our world’s history. This is a tour through the quirks of fate and the marvels of chance.

In every tale and map, the world’s most astounding, improbable, and, above all, unexpected locations, providing a captivating glimpse into the tapestry of human history and the unpredictability of our planet’s hidden wonders. This literary voyage is an ode to the curious and the adventurous, celebrating the unexpected marvels that define our world. This is a literary and visual adventure that will immerse you in far-off lands and obscure discoveries, offering a unique perspective on the world’s hidden treasures.

Some truly remarkable works of art have been inspired by artists spending time away from their typical surroundings.

From epic road trips and arduous treks into remote territories to cultural tours and sojourns in the finest hotels, this book explores 30 influential journeys taken by artistic greats and reveals the repercussions of those travels on the painters’ personal lives and the broader cultural landscape.

Award-winning author Travis Elborough brings each of these trips to life with fascinating insights into the stories behind the creation of some of the world’s most famous paintings, including Henri Matisse’s vivid paintings of Morocco, Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock prints of Mount Fuji in Japan, Marianne North’s paintings of India and David Hockney’s California pool paintings.

‘It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes’ New Statesman

‘Lively, engaging and admirably wide-ranging’ The Times

‘Fascinating’ Observer

The humble pair of glasses might just be one of the world’s greatest inventions, allowing millions to see a world that might otherwise appear a blur. And yet how much do many of us really think about these things perched on the ends of our noses?

Through the Looking Glasses traces the fascinating story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids for monkish scribes right through to today’s designer eyewear and the augmented reality of Google Glass. There are encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers and spectacle-makers, as well as the silent movie star Harold Lloyd, the rock’n’roller Buddy Holly and the full-screen figure of Marilyn Monroe. This is a book about vision and the need for humanity to see clearly, and where the impulse to improve our eyesight has led us.

From  Herman Melville’s first whaling voyage in 1841, from New York to Liverpool, to Jack Kerouac’s on-the-road Odyssey, which is now an iconic drive, discover how these journeys imprinted themselves on some of the greatest literary minds of all time.

Complete with navigational notes, colour photographs and commissioned maps, the fresh insights within tell readers something new about the places, work and personalities of some of the world’s greatest minds.

From ancient ruins and crumbling castles to more recent relics – an art deco New York subway station, a Soviet ghost town in the Arctic Circle, a flooded Thai mall teeming with aquatic life – Travis Elborough takes you on a journey into these strange, overlooked and disappearing worlds and immortalises their fates.

Original maps and stunning colour photography accompany Travis Elborough’s moving historic and geographic accounts of each site. The featured locations are a stark reminder of what was, and the accounts in  this investigative book help to bring their stories back to life, telling us what happened, when and why, and to whom.

The book features 40 sites, including:

• Santa Claus, Arizona, USA: A festive tourist resort turned ghost town  deep in the desert where once you could meet Santa Claus any day of the year;
• Crystal Palace Subway, London, UK: One of the city’s best-kept secrets is an  underground, cathedral-like relic from where many Victorian commuters bustled through;
• Montserrat, West Indies: The small Caribbean island with a population of 5,000 that was evacuated when its volcano erupted in 1995. The volcano is still active and nearly half the island remains a designated exclusion zone;
• Balaklava Submarine Base, Crimea: The former top-secret Soviet submarine base that was  kept off all official maps and known as Object 825 GTS;
• Volterra Psychiatric Hospital, Tuscany, Italy: Once dubbed ‘the place of no return’, this long-closed lunatic asylum once housed 6,000 patients who were never allowed to leave.

Also in the Unexpected Atlas series:  Atlas of Improbable Places, Atlas of Untamed Places, Atlas of the Unexpected and Atlas of Vanishing Places  (WINNER Illustrated Book of the Year – Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2020).

The humble pair of glasses might just be one the world’s greatest inventions, allowing millions to see a world that might otherwise appear a blur. And yet how much do many of us even really think about these things perched on the ends of our noses?

In this eye-opening history Travis Elborough traces the fascinating true story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids to monkish scribes right through to today’s designer eyewear and the augmented reality of Google Glass. And taking in along the way such delights as lorgnettes, monocles, pince-nez, tortoise-shell ‘Windsors’ and Ray Ban aviator shades.

Peering into early theories about how the eye worked, he considers the theological and philosophical arguments about the limits of perception by Greek thinkers, Roman statesmen and Arab scholars. There are encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers and spectacle-makers and opticians, brilliant, mad, bad and dangerous to know, in the Londons of Samuel Pepys, Dr Johnson and Sherlock Holmes.

We learn how eyeglasses were the making of the silent movie star Harold Lloyd and the rock n roller Buddy Holly and helped liberate an exasperated John Lennon from Beatlemania. Get hip to horn-rims with Dizzy Gillespie and Michael Caine And see girls in glasses through the lenses of the crime fiction by Dorothy L Sayers and Raymond Chandler and the full-screen figure of Marilyn Monroe.

Through the Looking Glasses is about vision and the need for humanity to see clearly, and where the impulse to improve our eyesight has led us. The society of the spectacle may finally be upon us . . . but how much of it do we really see?

It is perhaps the eighth wonder of our world that despite modern mapping and satellite photography our planet continues to surprise us.

Travis Elborough goes in search of the obscure and bizarre, the beautiful and estranged. From the church tower of  San Juan Parangaricutiro – that miraculously stands as the sole survivor of a town sunk by lava – to the underground realms of Berlin and Beijing dug for refuge and  espionage, these maps reveal incredible stories of hidden lairs, forgotten cities and improbable wonders.

With beautiful maps and stunning photography,  Atlas of Improbable Places  is a fascinating voyage to the world’s most unusual destinations. These curious locations are not just extraordinary sights, but reflections on our own relationship with the world around us.  

A Traveller’s Year is an anthology of extracts from diaries, journals and letters, two or three for each day of the year, on the subject of travel and exploration. The extracts convey men and women’s experiences of travel and discovery from the sixteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, with an emphasis on the period 1750-1950, the classic era of both European exploration and diary-writing. The authors of the pieces range from famous explorers such as Captains Cook and Scott to modern travel writers journeying through the contemporary world, from people who pushed back the boundaries of geographical knowledge to people who wrote about what they did on their summer holidays.  

The book includes an introduction, explanatory notes and mini-biographies of all the contributors.  

Contributors include:

Gertrude Bell (woman traveller in the Middle East)

James Boswell (travels in Scotland and the Hebrides)

William Cobbett (Rural Rides through England)

Christopher Columbus (journals of his voyages to America)

Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle)

Captain James Cook (voyages in the Pacific)

Washington Irving (American writer travelled in Europe in first decades of nineteenth century)

Edward Lear (landscape painter and nonsense writer produced journals of his travels in Greece, Corsica, Near East etc)

Lewis & Clark (journals of famous journey of American exploration)

William Morris (wrote a journal of a trip to Iceland in 1870s)

Michael Palin (a Python abroad)

Mungo Park (African explorer in early nineteenth century)

Captain Robert Falcon Scott (doomed journey to South Pole)

Evelyn Waugh (diaries of 1930s travels in Mediterranean and beyond)

William John Wills (explorer of Australia)