Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [60]
Paris Traditions (Watson-Guptill, 1999). This lavishly illustrated hardcover features contributions by eight writers on architecture, art, fashion, festivals, food and drink, music, sports, and stage and film. The photographs and illustrations are really wonderful and I find this book to be great for whetting one’s appetite for Paris. A four-page directory of addresses appears at the back of the book.
Paris: Wish You Were Here!, edited by Christopher Measom (Welcome Books, 2008). This chunky, hugely appealing book is organized by arrondissement, and sandwiched in between sections are excerpts from works by Mark Twain, Anita Loos, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Franklin, David Sedaris, Ludwig Bemelmans, and more; song lyrics; notes on les Américains à Paris (Charles Lindbergh, Josephine Baker, Mary Cassatt, etc.); recommendations for historic monuments, places to eat, and cultural offerings; and wonderful illustrations, reproductions, and photographs in black and white and color. Measom’s own first trip to Paris was when he was a student in Spain, where it was so hot and dry that by November he had running water only a few hours day. When he got to Paris, it was overcast, cool, and there was plenty of running water, and he’s been smitten with the city ever since. This is a great book to give as a gift if you could ever part with it.
Quiet Corners of Paris, Jean-Christophe Napias with photographs by Christophe Lefébure (Little Bookroom, 2007). This wonderful little gem of a book will ensure you see many of the lesser-known corners of Paris, including parks, gardens, squares, villas, cul-de-sacs, places, rues, backstreets, passages, art galleries, hills, buttes, cloisters, courtyards, churches, cemeteries, museums, international cultural centers, and libraries. Plus there’s one hôtel, the Hôtel des Grandes Écoles (75 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, 5ème), which is also one that I recommend. The author informs us that this book’s job is “to lead questers to the city’s magical islands—famous or unknown—where their thirst for silent escapes can be slaked.” It positively succeeds. Just a few coins (corners) this book led me to are the Jardin Saint-Gilles-Grand-Veneur (3ème), Butte-aux-Cailles (13ème), Square d’Orléans (9ème), and Square Récamier (7ème).
Remembrance of Things Paris: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet, edited and with an introduction by Ruth Reichl (Modern Library, 2004). For those readers who are clippers (like me), you will want to read this terrific anthology even if you already have most of the original articles from Gourmet in your files (as I do). As Reichl notes in the introduction, “For a true gourmet in the first few decades of the twentieth century, Paris was the heart’s home, the place that mattered, a shrine for everyone who believed that eating well was the best revenge. It was where Hemingway’s Moveable Feast took place, where Liebling spent his time Between Meals, where M. F. K. Fisher’s Gastronomical Me was born.” But Gourmet was founded in 1941, when Paris was impossible to visit, so it took a few years for Paris to be properly featured in its pages. The book is divided into ten sections—including “Remembering Paris,” “Feeding a City,” “Americans in Paris,” and “The Bistro Scene”—and some of my favorite articles ever written about the city are here: “Paris in the Twenties” by Irene Corbally Kuhn; “The Old Flower Market” by Joseph Wechsberg; “Noël à Paris” by Judith and Evan Jones; “It’s What’s for Dinner” by François Simon; and all the pieces by Naomi Barry (there are ten here). This book, like the magazine I very much miss, reminds us that food is linked in so many ways to place; in reading about one you also learn a lot about the other.
Seven Ages of Paris, Alistair Horne (Knopf, 2002). In