Travel Guide to Nowhere

As a follow-up to my post about fake Chinese business books and gurus, I found this book concept very interesting:

It's a travel guide to a made up place! Many of us like to read travel books to live vicariously through them, so why not a made up place?

I got this from the Hardie Grant Publishing website. To find the book, click on the nonfiction section (why in the NONfiction section, it's fiction!) You can even visit Molvania's website!

Molvania

By Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner & Rob Sitch
The funniest book about travel you will ever read: a travel guide to the fictional European republic Molvania, birthplace of the polka and whooping cough. The text and design draw on the standard travel guide format and include: background information on the destination, including cultural details, useful phrases, holidays, and calendar of events; accommodation and restaurant listings; activities and excursions; as well as text break-outs, colour photos and maps throughout. Travel books would have to be one of the most widely read and recognisable forms of publishing in the world. Everyone who has ever ventured overseas has done so armed with a copy of the latest Lonely Planet, Frommers, Fodors, Insight, Footloose, Rough or Michelin Guide. Given this level of awareness it is high time someone did a humorous send-up of these books, in the form of a warm, satirical and very funny guide to a country that simply doesn't exist. That country is Molvania, a small Eastern European nation keen to position itself as a tourist attraction.

RRP $27.95 paperback

Visit beautiful Molvania online at www.molvania.com

It might be fun to create a fake travel guide, what do you think?

Comments

[Michael Jones]

I've got this book on my desk. Like any travel guide, it's a bit silly to read linearly, but it's quite a funny read if you just pick it up from time to time, flip to a page and read a couple of pages. Most the humour comes from its letter-perfect parody of the travel genre.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Michael, I just have to ask: How many people pick up the book and ask you about Molvania like it's a real place? And do you pull their leg?