Souvenirs de Voyage, A Traveler's Keepsake Book [Hardcover]

Louise Kollenbaum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2002

That scallop-edged napkin from the cafe in Paris; a tiny shell from that deserted beach in the Caribbean; the ticket stub from that overnight train trip through China. The small mementos you collect on vacation can be as varied as your travels, and combined into collages, they make personal and evocative reminders of the experience. In Souvenirs de Voyage, Louise Kollenbaum offers her own travel collages along with tips on collecting, journal writing, and making art from your souvenirs. Glassine envelopes throughout will hold and protect your treasures.

Editorial Reviews

Review

At the end of the road, the traveler, laden with a suitcase full of dirty clothes, returns home to a stack of bills and the frantic blink of the answering machine. Immediately, the vacation glow begins to fade.

All that remains of the journey is a jumble of seemingly useless flotsam that is usually swept into a bureau drawer.

Louise Kollenbaum, a Bay Area author, graphic designer and founder of Mother Jones magazine, has written and designed a journal, "Souvenirs de Voyage: A Traveler's Keepsake Book" that corrals the ephemera of travel.

" 'Voyage' was inspried by my own love of collecting and the discovery that active gathering along the way sparks an attention to detail that can make one look upon the trip differently," says Kollenbaum. "Later, even the simplest scraps can both insprie and call back memory."

The 128-page book, easily tucked into a carry-on bag, contains tales of Kollenbaum's favorite journeys, as well as chapters on collecting, design, the art of collage, preservation and composition.

The canvas-trimmed binding is fitted with elastic bands that allow for expansion. The exquisitely crafted collages star Kollenbaum's personal stash of ticket stubs, stamps, eggshells, fabric swatches and a single pressed grape leaf that has the power to invoke a miagical Tuscan idyll.

Interspersed are glassine envelopes that protect viewing of treasures, as will as lined and blank pages upon which to capture reveries - and mementos.

Kollenbaum's elegant bok imbues the traveler with the creativity to craft a talismanic travel diary as evocative as one of Proust's beloved madeleines. -San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author

Louise Kollenbaum is an award-winning art director and designer. As founding art director of Mother Jones, she won numerous design honors including the prestigious National Magazine Award. She has also worked as creative director for Smith & Hawken and design director for Banana Republic. Ms. Kollenbaum currently lives in San Francisco.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811832872
• ISBN-13: 978-0811832878
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 8.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,246,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't Leave Home Without It--The Perfect Travel Companion!, June 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Souvenirs de Voyage, A Traveler's Keepsake Book (Hardcover)

For me, photos don't always tell the whole story when I'm trying to remember my last vacation. They just don't bring back the feelings, aromas, and memories that are always the best part of any trip. This book fixes that problem forever. It's a keepsake book, in more ways than one. First, the book itself --with string bindings and transparent sleeves to hold travel treasures--is a thing of beauty. You'll want to keep it on your coffee table whenever it's not in use. Second, and this is the best part, Kollenbaum tells you how to collect ordinary but meaningful reminders of your favorite adventures and places--ticket stubs, bottle caps, flowers, cancelled stamps, foreign-language menus--and turn them into a memory-filled collage of your trip. There are also lots of blank journal pages you can fill with sketches and/or a written diary. Her writing is clear and thorough. She even describes archiving techniques and gives advice on the right glue to use. The collage examples in the book are made up of her own delightful souvenirs from trips to Italy and other distant places, but she makes me feel that I can do it just as beautifully. Buy this book for your next trip. Your whole family will love it!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally! The travel book we need to have at home with us!, July 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Souvenirs de Voyage, A Traveler's Keepsake Book (Hardcover)

Well, someone has finally had the extremely good sense to give us a place to put the small, precious things we pick up when we travel. I do this all the time when I travel, and so by the time I get home these little objects are all over my luggage, squashed, crushed, torn and dispersed. This book, which is so beautiful in its own right, offers a place to keep these keep-sakes and gives excellent suggestions for what to do with them, for how to add to one's collection, for how to make the whole business of travel more enjoyable by concentrating on the creation of this collection. I find that these small things are, over time, more evocative than photographs and even better than pure memory but one has to have a place for them, a way to preserve and display them. I'd say: Don't ever again travel without it or let any friend or relative go off into the unknown without this useful and lovely gift from you.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking All Your Senses on a Trip, September 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Souvenirs de Voyage, A Traveler's Keepsake Book (Hardcover)

Just the way this book feels in your hand is enough to win you over. And that's a clue because it's a kind of magic wand in coaxing travelers to open up their senses. With its tactile quality and visual playfulness--and all these practical ways to store mementoes directly within the strong pages--this book reminds me of the feeling I used to get as a child opening up a new adventure book. Not only could I touch it and see it but I could almost hear it--almost smell the scents of new places.

My mother is turning 85 this year. She is a great history buff who has always wanted to travel and never has, but a dear young friend of hers, soon off to Europe, is planning to return with stories of her trip to relay to my mom. I picked up this book to send to the friend, as a way to keep her memories fresh for the telling. Meaning only to glance through it to be sure it offered plenty of blank space for journaling, I became entranced by the writing. I could hear Louise Kollenbaum's love of new places-those found within herself as well as along foreign sidewalks-within the tone of these graceful sentences. It's kind of a shocker actually--the writing is so brief yet it's replete with all the practical tips you'd ever need to help you gather, sort and fix your experiences into memory--details that both instruct and inspire.

Pervading these paragraphs I could discern a steady hum of pleasure and excitement, all the things you look for in traveling. She calmly and cleverly coaxes us into using our imagination, which she says is our best traveling companion. And in doing so, she makes this book an example of the kind of harmony within that a person can feel when opening up the senses to the extraordinary waiting for us in ordinary encounters.

I am more an auditory than a visual person, so I'm surprised at how much color came alive for me in the book. Now that I feel less intimidated by the visual, I'm going to try one of those collages myself. Kollenbaum's effort to encourage us to synthesize our senses--to blend them all together meaningfully in the heart as well as on paper--has been successful with me. This book is a great gift item--now I'm going to buy one for myself!