Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide [Hardcover]

Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Author), Barbara Hodgson (Collaborator), Nick Bantock (Collaborator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1996

From the author of The Transitive Vampire, comes an invitation to a strangely illuminated City of Light, Paris out of Hand. This seductively beautiful replica of a 19th-century travel book—replete with illustrations of sights you will never see and maps that may plummet you into a different era—guides readers through the Paris that is, that might be, and that never was. Amid the Parisian locales you know and love, unheard-of temptations abound. If your visit to the Cafe Conjugal ends in a spat, you can make up at the luscious and fantastic Museum of Lips and Books. From the disconcerting Brasserie Loplop, steal your chair for the Cinema Pont Neuf, whose movies flow onto the Seine. Your curiosity sated for the day, check into Hotel des Etrangers, where phantoms change the sheets and your room in the middle of the night. Unhandy glossaries help you talk your way through these provocative encounters, with such apropos comments as J'aimerais sortir avec votre hyene pour boire un verre (I'd like to take your hyena out for a drink). A rare and rowdy entertainment that dares its readers to explore a Paris one can only wish existed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The conceit behind this playful, charming spoof of a book is as simple and bizarre as a Magritte painting: it is a guide to an imaginary Paris, complete with fake hotel listings, off-the-wall travel advice and restaurant recommendations that aim more at literary than culinary edification. In Gordon's Paris, tourists may stop at the Grand Hotel des Echecs, home to a clientele made up of chess lovers and losers ("echecs" means both "chess" and "failures" in French); dine at the Cafe Dada, where one inserts food into an Automat and is fed foreign coins in return; or take in a film at the Cinema l'Ange des Sables, which shows only movies shot in the desert. "Ici on parle angoisse" ("Anguish spoken here"), Gordon informs us of one hotel. Admirers of Gordon's previous work, which includes the popular grammar handbook The Transitive Vampire and the novel The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales, will not be surprised to find her drawing heavily on the work of such writers as Paul Valery, Guillaume Apollinaire and Raymond Queneau for her wealth of puns, wordplay and double-entendres. This is not a book to read cover to cover, but rather to dip into when the appetite strikes. When the absurdist humor gets too coy or heavy-handed, readers may refresh themselves by studying the surrealist collages and illustrations illuminating every page. Meticulously drawn, finely detailed and brimming with whimsy, they are happily reminiscent of those in Bantock's own Griffin & Sabine books.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Barbara Hodgson, and Nick Bantock collaborated on the writing, illustration, and design of Paris out of Hand.

. . . The book -- cartwheeling over so many issues of design, color, art history, stand-up comedy and performance art that I must remind myself that it is a lo-and-behold book -- provides a mischievous, faux travelogue of a brightly imagined Paris. Columbus Dispatch

--Columbus Dispatch
To the immortal health of Karen Elizabeth Gordon's Paris Out of Hand, the most entertaining nonfiction book I've read all year. Her delirium of prose stands out among the year's best fiction, too. . . The book -- cartwheeling over so many issues of design, color, art history, stand-up comedy and performance art that I must remind myself that it is a lo-and-behold book -- provides a mischievous, faux travelogue of a brightly imagined Paris. Paris Out of Hand is told and sung through fiction, fakery and the bold interplay of words and images. . . . Everything in her City by the Seine is surreal, magical, and possible: At the Hotel Helias, "Paris' answer to the Heartbreak Hotel," handkerchiefs are handed out with room keys; and chocolate, because of it's euphoric and erotic properties is strictly forbidden.

The sustained performance is one of grins and asides, in which the allusions to France, literature, the artists of the old Left Bank, come in buckets; one can sip and dip at leisure.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books; First Edition edition (August 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811809692
• ISBN-13: 978-0811809696
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #174,851 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is it a guide? Is it a novel? No! It's a work of art!, August 18, 1999

By 

T. Lumsdaine (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide (Hardcover)

Curiously, my local bookshop stocks this wonderful book in the "Travel" section. From the cover with the inverted Eiffel Tower to the hilarious "hotel features" icons, even the least adventurous armchair traveller can deduce that this is indeed a unique tourist guide. It is a guide of sorts: taking the Parisians on at their own game it transforms a city known for its absurdities into a whimsical looking-glass world where nothing is as it seems. Bantock's incredible illustrations and the feast of found images adorn the author's intoxicating prose. She lets us peek at the acidic comments written in the guestbooks of fictional hotels. Her cafes reek of gitanes and hallucinogenic pseudo-reality. Paris Out of Hand is a one-off classic, and my only complaint is that the type fades far too quickly from the cover with the inevitable constant handling. I've bought several copies and given them all away as gifts. Now I'm getting one for myself.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Weird, weird fun, March 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide (Hardcover)

Paris through the Looking Glass is the only way I can describe this book. It is set up exactly like any tourist guide book, and it took me a few pages to catch on that this book has nothing to do with the real Paris. The general style of the humor is reminiscent of Edward Gorey, but it is original, and not a Gorey knock-off. I liked it better than Gorey, although like Gorey, it cloyed just a smidgen toward the end. Also just slightly reminiscent of the more fanciful "Sylvia" cartoons. Great fun, though, and I laughed out loud all the way through. A great gift for anyone who spends more time down the rabbit hole than in the real world.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, Intriguing. . ., January 21, 2001

By 

Adam (Spartanburg, SC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide (Hardcover)

This book is a georgous book, from its looks (plush cover, ribbon bookmark, illustrations) to its content. It describes a slew of fictional places (and a few non-fictional) creating a surrealistic, dreamlike landscape. As nice as it is, this isn't a sit down and read sort of book, more of a coffee table type, wonderful to flip through and see what you find.