The Bookshelf
Most trips I plan start with a book. These are the ones I'd put in your hands before you go: novels where the place is a character, the histories that explain it, and a few that will change how you look at a building.
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Jane Austen's England
Biographies, walking guides, a few Regency card games, and the novels themselves: the books I'd hand to anyone heading to Bath, Chawton or Winchester.
Walk it with us: the Austen AdventureNovels of Place
Novels where the place is a character. Every one is somewhere you can go, from the moors behind Haworth to the walls of Saint-Malo.
See the trips these books inspiredHistories of Place
The true stories behind places you can visit, from Al-Andalus to Oxford. Read one on the plane and the ruins start talking.
How to Look at Buildings
Books that teach you how to look at a building, and a few stories about the people who built them. Read one before you go and you'll see more when you get there.
Travel Writing
Writers who went somewhere and paid attention. The best travel writing makes you want to go, and tells you what to notice when you arrive.
Read something here that made you want to go?
That's how most of my trips begin. Tell me which book did it, and I'll build the trip around it.
Schedule a ChatOr browse the whole shop at bookshop.org/shop/nerdstour.