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Wish You Were Here: A Tour of America's Great Hotels During the Golden Age of the Picture Post Card
by Barry Zaid
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Crown (1990-10-17)
ISBN: 0517580098
EAN: 9780517580097
Dewey Decimal #: 741.6830973074
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 95 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1990-10-17
SKU: J 60
Condition: Very Good
Comments: 1990, 10.5 x 9, 96 pages, Hardcover with dustjacket in protected mylar cover (removable). Book & Dustjacket are in Very Good Condition. Book is completely intact with inside pages in Very Good condition with no tears and with no notations (no pencil marks, no underlining, no highlighting, etc.) ( « if ( document.getElementById ) { document.writeln('less'); } )
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Customer Reviews
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Wish you had been here
Rating  (5)
Date: 2010-07-14
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I find it odd that Barry Zaid's lovely collection of hotels has not been reprinted since it was published in 1990 and not even a paperback version. Fortunately copies are still out there and not too expensive.
I regard the book as a celebration of these exuberantly colored postcards from the past, depicting a time when it was always sunny and these hostels had just opened for business. A chapter called Grand Foyer has plenty of interiors all minus guests, though the Prince of Wales Hotel in Alberta, Canada has three people more or less in silhouette and the Balinese Room in the Chicago Blackstone has a five piece musical group playing for an empty room. The Dinner, Drinks and Dancing chapter has some stunning Art Deco and Streamline interiors and a nice touch is reproducing the caption from the address side of the postcard.
Many of the exteriors, of course, show guests enjoying the hotels gardens, pools or beach and the fronts on the street frequently have cars (clearly smaller than life size) and pedestrians. As all the cards are photo based the printers obviously took advantage of the retouching potential so the colors are bright and skies blue. This obviously adds enormously to their charm and nostalgia.
Designer and illustrator Zaid designed the book and it generally looks good but I thought it had a couple of minor editorial flaws: the grey background color to each page seems to overpower the cards a bit; a few cards are just too big because the enlargement shows up the rather crude illustrations (the Hotel Astor on page seventy has three cars that look just silly).
This is a delightful book and if you are interested in this postcard genre check out American Architecture: A Vintage Postcard Collection, a gorgeous looking book with 625 cards. Linen Postcards: Images of the American Dream covers the complete range with over five hundred examples and has a fascinating forty-nine illustrated pages looking in depth at the history and leading card companies.
***SEE SOME POSTCARDS INSIDE THE BOOK by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.
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Beautiful Pictures, But Lacking Other Useful Information
Rating  (3)
Date: 2002-09-09
2 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
When I picked up this book, I was hoping for something with a bit more historical information about the lovely cards Zaid has managed to assemble within its pages. In his introduction, he includes *some* information about Curt Teich & Company, which produced most of the cards in the collection, but I finished the book wanting more--either about the hotels themselves or the other card manufacturers of the era or (preferably) both.Instead, the book seems to be nothing more than a study in self-indulgence--an excuse for Zaid to show off his lovely collection of cards. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however, as most of the cards really are a treasure to look at. Nevertheless, as a reader, I wished for something a bit more educational than I usually get while standing at the boxes of old cards at a flea market. Therefore, I think Zaid would have benefitted from either a *narrower* focus in his construction of the book (perhaps featuring *only* cards from Curt Teich & Company and including a bit more about the cards he chose to present) or else a *wider* focus (with more information about the hotels depicted on the cards and the other manufacturers of cards of the era). It's clear from certain things Zaid says in his text that he has done lots of research in this field. I simply wish a bit more of it had managed to filter down into his text. Nevertheless, it *is* an lovely book of very attractive postcards and is great for enthusiasts of "the golden age of the picture post card."
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Nothing But Nostalgia
Rating (5)
Date: 2000-07-24
8 out of 8 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a book without intellectual pretension. It makes no attempt give any literary import to the postcards that the author has chosen to display here. It is a book about nostalgia.For me, nostalgia takes two forms; a feeling of fond remembrance for those things in my past which are no longer accessible to me for whatever reason, and a feeling of nostalgia for things that I wish I could have experienced. These feelings are coupled with a tinge of sadness. This book of hand-tinted postcards of hotels, motels, and inns of the 30's, 40's, and 50's brings up both kinds of feelings. Many, but not all, of these places no longer exist in their original form. Most are probably gone. Some have been remodeled and changed to a degree that they are no longer recognizable, and a few do remain, still looking as they've always looked. This is not an easy book to review in the traditional sense of reviewing, so I am taking a "been there, done that" approach. I think that's a fairly logical approach for any "nostalgiac." (Like that word? I just made it up.) Page 45: Hotel Muelbach -- Kansas City: I grew up about 60 miles from Kansas City and on several occasions visited The Muelbach with friends or family. One of the things that I remember most was a lobby decorated in deep maroon hues. I still associate that look with what I think opulence ought to be. I'm sorry The Muelbach's gone but thankful for this postcard from Zaid's collection. There are other places that bring back memories, particularly the various lodges around Glacier Park that are included in the illustrations. The last time I was in Glacier Park in Canada, these lodges had remained unchanged. I hope that they continue to do so. There are well over a hundred of these hand-tinted linen postcards illustrated in this book. I can almost guarantee you that if you put a copy of WISH YOU WERE HERE on your coffee table, most of your guests will gravitate to it, pick it up, and engage in exactly the same kind of reminiscing that I've done in this review.
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