The definitive pictorial dedicated to travel and the world, The Travel Book captures every country on the planet in photographs and atmospheric text. Inspirational, inviting and beautiful, it combines stunning images with entertaining, informative text that captures the essence of being there. User-friendly A-to-Z coverage of every country in the world with double-page spreads of every country. Includes cultural insights, key facts and maps. Breathtaking photographs that capture the soul of each destination from Lonely Planet’s comprehensive image library, Lonely Planet Images. Preview selections from The Travel Book on Cuba, Greece, Ethiopia, and Swaziland in LonelyPlanet.com's On the Road section or Download our free Screensaver.

The Travel Book Introduction
This month we bring you the whole world through possibly our most ambitious project to date: The Travel Book. Find out about this world publishing first through the following edited extract from the book's introduction, including a taste of what to expect for every country covered in this big-picture volume:

The Travel Book contains some 1200 images and 100,000 words, and covers 230 countries. We started the book with a seemingly simple proposition – to represent every country in the world through amazing images and inspirational text in an accessible A to Z format. A few obstacles soon stood in our way. Firstly, the possible answers to the question ‘what is a country?’ Secondly, the fact that we set out to create a travel book, not an exhaustive reference book of the world. We viewed the world through the lens of the traveller, focusing on places to visit for their beauty, fascination or singularity, even if this sometimes conflicted with the world as it is defined by political or geographical borders. And lastly, sheer logistics - the world is a breathtakingly big place, and to cover it all in one book is a big ambition.

Our first port of call was the United Nations’ list of defined countries – all 192 of these had an automatic ticket for entry into the book. The UN list does not include the foreign dependencies of these countries, whether self-governing or Crown colony, but we wanted to feature some of these places because they are ever-popular traveller hang-outs. In this category we included some, but not all, Caribbean islands and groups, as well as Bermuda, New Caledonia, the Cayman Islands and French Polynesia, all dependencies of geographically far-flung entities.

We decided, based on traveller interest more than political correctness, to feature the component parts of Britain – England, Scotland and Wales – as separate entities. Archenemies and old friends, these countries all have rich and distinctive histories and cultures, which hold enduring appeal for travellers. Other destinations, such as vibrant and colourful Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, which are all parts of China, have historic identities that separate them from their present-day political situation. Antarctica and Greenland are not countries, strictly speaking, but these vast lands are not only extremely photogenic, they are also fascinating to visit, a fact not lost on adventure travellers who make tracks there in ever-increasing numbers.

The guiding philosophy for us in writing this book was to present a subjective ‘Lonely Planet’ view of the world which gets under the skin of the place, showing a slice of life in every single country in the world. With just two pages per country, we could never hope to cover everything, so we chose instead to evoke the spirit of the place by focusing on the senses – what might you expect to see, what might you hear people say in conversation or greeting, what kind of food or drink can you expect to taste, and what sort of music, books or film would help open up your imagination to each country? In this sense, the book is much more about impressions than dry statistics – impressions that we hope will whet your appetite to find out more.

The same applied to image selection: we could never illustrate every aspect of every country in this book, so we again focused on capturing the spirit of a place and its people. Our image researchers avoided clichéd icons and picture-postcard views, beautiful as they often are, in favour of the icons of everyday life – people together and alone relaxing, eating, walking, reading, praying, working, sleeping, laughing and living.

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