Literary Tourist
Created by writer and interviewer Nigel Beale, Literary Tourist is a celebration of books and travel that explores the world, and print culture, through bookshops, flea markets, libraries, festivals, and literary landmarks — with a hungry collector’s eye. Literary Tourist is a travelogue that provides the back-story to interviews conducted for The Biblio File podcast.
Find Exactly What Your Looking For
With two decades of posts, essays, reviews, and reflections, there’s plenty to explore — from literary criticism and musings on design, to reflections on culture, places and bookish people. Use the search below to search the archive and find ideas worth underlining.
ABOUT LITERARY TOURIST
Where Curiosity
Meets Culture
There are many ways to be a literary/biblio tourist. You can while away hours in a secondhand bookshop, attend a writing workshop, tour an author’s home, visit a rare book library, write your masterpiece in a louche literary café. For me, it’s all of this and more. Mostly, however, it’s about the people behind the pages. The writers, editors, designers, and collectors, who’ve made books their life.
The Literary Tourist website began as a place where I documented my travels, collecting books, photographing used bookstores before they disappeared. Then it broadened to include the stories behind my encounters with ‘best practitioners’ in the book world The Biblio File Backstory.
Think of this place as a field guide for those who enjoy travel, reading, collecting and talking books.
WHAT IS LITERARY TOURIST?
To Wander, Collect,
Read and Record
Live the life
My hope is that these stories encourage you to embark on your own journey - a literary adventure: visit a bookshop in a strange part of town and cart home some books, or explore a special collections library; sign up for a writing workshop, hang out at a literary cafe and capture your wisdom in a cool-coloured Moleskin; tarry with a bookseller; talk with an author; connect with fellow booklovers; hunt and collect what you love. Participate in print culture.
I hope this all adds as much meaning and joy to your life, as it has mine!
Featured Destinations
Four Cities Every Literary Tourist Should Visit
01/ Tokyo
The Precision of Print
From tiny design-forward bookshops in Shinjuku to the hushed reverence of Tsutaya’s art-filled shelves, Tokyo offers a study in the aesthetics of reading. Here, books are curated like art and bought like candy — deliberately, joyfully, beautifully.
02/ London
The Heartbeat of Literature
From Bloomsbury’s blue plaques to the dusty stacks of Charing Cross Road, London hums with literary ghosts. It’s where publishing as we know it began — and where it continues to reinvent itself daily.
03/ France
The City of Stories
Walk along the Seine and you’ll see why writers never left. Between the bouquinistes’ green stalls, the café conversations, and the salons that birthed modern thought, Paris is a living archive of the written word.
04/ New York
The Book as Cultural Pulse
New York is restless, argumentative, brilliant — a place where words are currency and ideas are traded like stocks. Its independent bookstores, publishing houses, and reading rooms keep the city’s literary metabolism high and endlessly fascinating.
Kafka, Heartfield, Prague
This won’t be your typical European travelogue. There won’t be any marvelling over architecture, raving about gourmet cuisine, or plugging of four star hotels. This is a literary tourist’s reaction to a stunning, precious city, in unsettled times,
Frankfurt Book Fair: the bad, the good, and the dangerous. Part l
I had some family business to attend to in Prague and decided to head over. No big diversion required, pretty well all flights to this part of the world go through Frankfurt.
Alsace, Storks, Paper Museums, Verlaine and Gargoyles.
My wife and her parents had driven from Le Mans, France over to Eguisheim, a little town just SW of Colmar, in Alsace. I was to meet them there (last summer). Not exactly book country, but there were lots of storks
Florida, Boo Bou, Mitch Kaplan, Michael Dirda…
We got a cat. Named her Boo Bou. She was afraid of her own shadow when we got her. Still is. Why Boo Bou and not Boo Boo? Because Caroline is French and I’m English/Canadian.
Thrifts, magnificent publishing achievements, and Frum in Prince Edward County
An interview with David Frum was in the offing at The Drake. Subject: Trumpocalypse, a prescriptive companion to Trumpocracy. A plea for reconciliation and nation building after an orange canker’s unsuccessful attempt to violently overthrow the people’s will.
Botanical Snow Storm in Montreal
We were both pretty set on our mission. The fact that a monster Spring snow-storm was in the early stages of dumping its avalanche onto the city meant little.
Giants in Boston
You're right Ted, writing these literary adventures is a great way to enjoy and live them again...despite the fact that, in this instance, it was raining, pretty heavily.
Legal Revealing in Boston
We went for the breakfast buffet at the hotel. One of the servers raved about this Chia pudding mixture presented in a little glass cup. It was so good I had two.
Making the First Move
Next morning we jumped on "the T," and headed downtown for breakfast on fashionable Newbury Street, a good place to spot funky window displays. Here's an artsied-up photograph I took of one:
REVIEWS & REFLECTIONS
What the literati are saying
"I wanted to thank you for your many generous and intelligent words about my new book How Fiction Works (and other stuff)... I get great pleasure from reading your blog."
— Critic, James Wood, The New Yorker
"You can find very bad writing and sloppy impressionism in literary blogs, but also incisive, fresh, thoughtful criticism from voices unencumbered by the politics of Grub St". I would put your blog in the latter category, which is why I’m responding here… Congratulations on a very fine blog."
— Scholar, Dr. Ronan McDonald, author of The Death of the Critic
"Nigel Beale is one of the sharpest readers and reviewers of our age. His profound knowledge of every aspect of the literary business is carried with grace and charm in podcasts that will delight all who read."
— Author and political analyst David Frum
Literary lens
Invite Nigel Beale in!
He works with destinations around the world helping them to attract literary tourists and book-lovers
