Customer Reviews

Knopf Guide: Paris (Knopf Guides)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are going to Paris, this is one of the two books that you must have as a minimum. It is gorgeous, lush, dense with illustrations. Knopf does the best job on items like flora, fauna, architecture, history, art, how the city has been seen by others, its fashion legacy, street life, medieval influence, sub-cultures, music, and so on, each topic at least a two page spread that is always satisfying to the eyes.
A guided walking tour is the standard Knopf format for revealing the city, as opposed to the Eyewitness itemized number format. The Eyewitness guide is the other half of the pair that you must have to visit Paris, each complementing the other rather than competing. This Knopf guide has some gorgeous pull out maps/pages in the middle of the book that are really great.
The Knopf weakness is in it's ability to help you plan: There is a wonderful diagram of the Catacombs, on a fold out page showing details about the fascinating sites beneath the city, with pictures of some of the bones in the Catacombs; but nowhere will the Knopf guide tell you what time it is open or when. The Eyewitness guide is much stronger in that respect, the Knopf guides are almost as good as the Eyewitness when it comes to maps, the Eyewintness being better.
The Knopf guide has 7 pages of general index plus 10 pages for listing illustrations. The Eyewitness guide has 20 pages of general index with none for illustrations, which is to say the Knopf guide is more romantic, the Eyewitness guide more practical, they are 5 star both, and you should have both.

The trouble with most travel books is that if you don't have the most recent edition, the information is probably out of date. The beauty of this book on Paris is that there is information on the culture, the cuisine, the history, the art, with a small, very small section on hotels and restaurants. This is not just a great book to prepare you for your trip to Paris, this is a book for a student of the city.

This guide is wonderful for anybody who wants to see the true city beyond the modern facade of fast food joints and chain stores. It will give you great insights into the history of Paris, without endless boring lists of hotels and restaurants. There is so much you might miss otherwise, and it would be a shameful waste of time to go there without fully appreciating all the secrets, legends, gossip and wonderful stories. And to read what the writers think of Paris, and how the artists see it....it makes the city come to life. If you want maps and lists, get another guide. If you want to know what you're looking at, get this one!

It is this book that showed me a guide book can be a mixture of usefulness on the trip and a coffee table memento when home. Size and design are elegant for both purposes. The book is a fascinating mixture of current, historical, and obscure Paris. Details of the underground water, sewer, quarry, and catacomb systems under the city are pictured where they have always only been skimmed over in Michelin. Knowing that there was at least one music concert there, that they were headquarters for the French Resistance during WW2 as well as the Germans having a bunker there, each incredibly close neighbors unbeknown to the other, can only enhance your fascination with the life and history of the city and your visit. Views of the river banks and bridges when they were crowded to overflowing with houses, the woods around Versailles as they were being cleared for building, historical views of buildings and events, give a sense of a city with a long and rich history of civilization, all of which enriches a current visit. Sections on architecture, writer's 'views' of Paris, painter's 'views' of Paris, and unexpected sections on the rooftops and birds and gardens of Paris, all make for a delightfully informative read and armchair tour along with current information you'd expect to find on hotels restaurants, cafés, shopping, etc.

As you read through the density of information, the quirkiness of the book itself begins to emerge. There are columns of writing where the text just disappears mid-sentence off the page never to be found again. One entire page (the back of the fold-out for the Musée d' Orsay) remains in the original French, untranslated. You'd think, since this book has been out since 1995 (with revisions), that the proof-reading would be better, even if it was a daunting task rendering it into English from the original French edition. The 3D arial maps of various areas feel odd. While the ones of the right bank are anchored by the river at the bottom looking north and feel like the way they 'should' be, the ones of the left bank are also anchored by the river at the bottom and looking south, take a bit of getting used to. The street plan at the back professes to overlap a bit map to map, and they do sideways, but up and down, sections of all are missing. (You might want to get the full Michelin map book of relatively the same size).

Aldous Huxley once wrote a travel essay that he liked to stumble around a new place on his first visit without prior knowledge or guide, then would read the guide books for subsequent trips. I don't think this approach will work for Paris, unless you want to be kicking yourself over what you missed on your first trip. Get this book and give it a thorough read before you go. There is too much to spend your time in Paris buried in the book reading it and languishing in the lavish visual presentation for the first time. Then you can decide what you want to orient yourself to: culture, food, shopping, history, gardens, architecture, artistic life, sight-seeing, and in which proportions, and you will be relieved to forgive yourself in advance knowing now that if you want to get anywhere close to a sense of the richness of what makes Paris, current and historical, there will be many trips in your future, both from your armchair back home with this book, and, when you decide you have to go again to see and experience more.

In 1987 I visited paris for the first time. When I purchased this guide it was like going there many times over. It is truely one of the best books I have ever purchased. It is an art guide, history book, architecture study, travel guide and more.

What more could there be? This is an excellent reference all around. Its easy to research a novel from this tome alone. I felt that I stepped off a plane and had an excellent english speaking tour guide with me.

I naturally proceeded to get the rest of the set of travel guides. It was better than all the encyclopedias I had in school. The benefit of this series is that unless the world changes dramatically, the travel guides will not go out of style of years to come.

I love these Knopf guides, they are really beautiful little books and they are chocked full of information, granted they are not a quick guide, but if want indepth information and some deep research on Paris, then I highly recommend this guide, read it before you go to Paris, it will make the trip all the more enjoyable. Bon Voyage.

Easily one of the best Paris guide books on the market, Knopf's City Guide of Paris is a visual and textual delight. Suitable for those trying to plan a first visit as well as for the repeat visitor, the book is a cornucopia of artistic and photographic montages of most all of the major sights to be seen in the city. The treatment which the book provides is so extensive that many people do not exclusively use the book for only tourist visits: the volume also excellently permits us to vicariously revisit the city from home, as well as conduct informal research on the many aspects of Paris' history and culture. As a tourist guide, the book can therefore help you make decisions on what you wish to concentrate on during a vacation visit, but as a resource guide, the text can help you develop knowledge about all kinds of aspects of the city (history, cuisine, art and architecture, etc.). It is truly a lovely book to enjoy both inside and outside the city.

Some side comments are in order. For example, the book has been kept reasonably small so it can fulfill its purpose as a tourist guide. This means, however, that the page size is not the most convenient format for holding and reading the book for any length of time, and yet the beauty and written information in the volume compels us to do just that. This means we are sometimes locked into a small battle trying to open the book to ever greater degrees to make the page overlays more visible during longer reading sessions. And because the book is printed exclusively on high-quality gloss paper - a true delight in most any book - the volume feels like it weighs a metric ton. Why does that matter, you might ask? With airlines seemingly ever reducing and scrutinizing baggage weight limits, this single book is going to add a pound or two to either your checked baggage or your carry-on bag. When you are worried about reaching your baggage weight limits, this factor becomes a real issue. Nevertheless, I can tell you the book is so well done that I've brought it with me multiple times on trips to Paris due to the great information and illustrations it provides.

My own suggestion is that you couple this book with a good map of the city (which is sometimes best purchased while in Paris itself), and you have a great start to understanding the city. Another great addition to this book is one of the "walking guides" for the city (Tessan's City Walks: Paris: 50 Adventures on Foot is excellent). With these few books, you have more than enough to have a great visit to the City of Lights. Bon voyage!

No I do not work for the publisher, but as someone who will spend 4 months planning 14 days away. I must say if I could bring only one book, this would be it. I have used it on every trip to Paris, and have not been led wrong by it. The book touches upon almost every conceivable church, museum, square, fountain, etc. that is within the City proper. If you were to study this book for 2 weeks with a larger Michelin map of the City,(one that is entirely on one looseleaf page, you could put the book down and completely navigate around the City on your own and find everything. Yes it is that good and well thought out. The ultimate writers of the guidebook deserve 'props' for how they did the book. I like the Knopf guides in general, but this one is the best.

Some caveats:

1. The hotel and restaraunt section IN THIS BOOK, in the back is too short and dated. The first and only time I booked a hotel in the back of a Knopf guidebook was in Venice and I GOT BURNED BAD! Unless you are talking about something world renown, like the Crillon, or the Cipriani in Venice, use another guidebook! For Paris, Cheap Sleeps/Cheap Eats has never done me wrong. In fact they have been uncommonly good.

2. There are a lot of tricks for getting around the City, getting into museums, etc. You won't find them in this book, you are going to have to go to Rick Steves for that!

3. The guidebook cant tell you what is best to see in this City, although it is not the Knopf guidebooks fault. It is the fault of the City of Paris. There is so much in that City, if you step off the plane and honestly look around, your head will spin, and perhaps you will start a lifelong love affair with it, as probably millions of others have. I don't think I have ever been happier, or more content, then sitting around drinking wine and eating frites somewhere in the Latin Quarter. Enjoy yourself and relax, the way the U.S. and the world is going, you may not get back there for a long long time.

Knopf guides are beautiful books with graphically interesting formats. They provide lots of background and historic information. Excellent for dreaming about trips and travels, real or imagined.

This book is simply stunning in design, and contains a wealth of background information combined with useful and lush illustrations. It's not particularly well-designed to provide hotel or resturant information, or practical travel advice. On the other hand, it will go out of date perhaps once each century.