Road Reads
Wallpaper* City Guides, by the editors of Wallpaper* magazine

Sunday, November 19, 2006

BOOK: Wallpaper* City Guides, by the editors of Wallpaper* magazine (Phaidon Press, $8.95 each; 20 guides in series, 40 more promised for 2007)

TARGET AUDIENCE: Turista-fashionistas.

It can't be coincidence that a Wallpaper* City Guide resembles nothing quite so much as an Apple iPod. Certainly it doesn't look like a tourist guidebook. Thick utility is abandoned for bulge-free cool. There is only one map ("hot 'hoods") per book; no mini-history; no thumbnail description of the local political system. And, most notably, no people in the photographs.

Instead, the series focuses on design: architecture (apparently uninhabited) and hotel room and shop interiors (like upscale furniture catalogues). In the London guide, for example, we see newly iconic office towers and sleek restaurant settings, but no palaces, no kids eating fish and chips.

The purpose here (beyond merely rejecting guidebook cliches) is to insinuate the reader into the city in a less linear way.

Notwithstanding the books' slight heft, the editors manage to work in a good deal of information without appearing to strain. They don't try to be comprehensive; rather, they provide a few illustrative examples, usually including photographs in which every pillow is properly fluffed and every bottle behind the bar is perfectly oriented.

The plodding boilerplate that typifies most guides is absent, supplanted by swoop and grace. But there's a risk: How long before swoop and grace become cliches themselves?

-- Jerry V. Haines