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 special collections library, or spend time writing 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’s work.
The Literary Tourist website began as a place to document my travels, photographing used bookstores before they disappeared. Then it broadened to include the stories behind my encounters with ‘best practitioners’ connected to ‘the book.’ Think of it as a field guide for people who believe that travel, books and conversation naturally belong together.
WHAT IS LITERARY TOURIST?
To Wander, Collect,
Read and Record
A Mission to Connect Readers, Writers, and Places
At its heart, Literary Tourist is inspired by connections — between words, places, ideas and design. For me, each journey I take involves a hunt for material evidence of how place influences print culture. Each provides the chance to marvel at how creative geniuses - writers and designers mostly, but also others, including all those in some way connected to the book - have captured and/or documented their experiences.
Travel exercises my curiosity. For me, seeing the world, collecting select printed parts of it, and pursuing conversations with the interested parties, has proven to be a fabulous way to educate and enlighten myself, the best way, in fact, for me to spend time - to lead a happy life.
I hope these stories encourage you to embark on your own journey - a literary adventure: visiting bookshops you may never have been to before; exploring literary destinations, participating in writing workshops, reading at writers’ cafes, jotting down your thoughts in a well-made notebook; talking with booksellers or authors; seeking out fellow booklovers; collecting what you find valuable or beautiful.
And I hope this helps add 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.
REVIEWS & REFLECTIONS
What Fellow
Travelers 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
Want your
attraction featured?
Invite Nigel Beale to visit!
He works around the world helping partners to attract literary tourists and promote their literary destinations, events and workshops.
