what do you do with your old travel guides?

[Deleted]

I can't seem to bring myself to donate or toss the travel guides I no longer need. I'm talking like the lonely planet and rick steeves kind of books. I also feel silly for keeping them.

What do you do with travel guides that you no longer need?

[Deleted]

I still have all mine, I'm the same. They are on a bookshelf. I dod occasionally revisit a country and re-use them.

[Deleted]

Donate them when my husband isn't looking (he never wants to part with them in case we go back). We also lend them out to friends/family who go to the same places.

Except for London ((though I go there to visit a friend, so I don't really need a book)), by the time I revisit a location the books I have are super outdated, so I'd want to buy new anyway. My husband doesn't seem to understand that.

If you donate, you sometimes have to do that quickly. The charity I donate books to doesn't want to take travel books that aren't the most recent edition.

[librarygirl]

For my old guidebooks, they're on a bookshelf in my "travel" room where I display prints I've had enlarged and other travel books (narratives, coffee table style ones ect). Just adds to the ambiance I feel. There are some really old ones I "could" get rid of but they were from when I studied abroad all over and they have little notes I scribbled in them. In short, they're definitely more meaningful and I wouldn't necessarily want to part with them anyway.

I do have about 5 DK Eyewitness guides which I love-I've never really gotten them for lodging and restaurant recs anyway, but more just for the beautiful photographs and illustrated maps of places and attractions. Travel porn I feel. So those guidebooks I could look at all the time because let's face it, the ruins at Chichen Itza are not changing and neither are the medieval streets in Sevilla's Barrio Santa Cruz.

[agnes]

I've only had the Rick Steve's guide to Paris which was given to H by one of his customers. I just left it in a drawer at the hotel. Woops.

[anna7602]

It depends on how attached I am to the place. I still have guidebooks for places I spent a significant amount of time in- studying or living abroad. It's nice to be able to look up names of streets or restaurants if I blank out or look at notes I took about certain attractions.

But most other guides, I give away. When I moved away from Paris last year, I gave a big stack of these different European cities guides to a travel-junkie friend. They were these perfect, pocket-sized little guides with all the hot spots in places like Berlin, Venice and Copenhagen that I traveled to while living in France. I just kept all the super-specialized Parisian guides- self-guided walking tours, things to do with kids, day trips outside the city, a guide to the city's outdoor markets, etc.

[SJ]

We keep them all. We are book hoarders though, and I like how they look all lined up on the shelves.

[mbcdefg]

I keep, donate, or recycle them. I buy pretty much all of my books secondhand, so most of my travel books were about $2 at a thrift store and I don't feel too bad about getting rid of them.

You could do something like this:

(I saw a neat example similar to this, where it was an Eiffel Tower cut out of a Paris map, but I can't find it right now.)

[mdgirl]

Jun 19, 2014 8:47:01 GMT -5 agnes said:

I've only had the Rick Steve's guide to Paris which was given to H by one of his customers. I just left it in a drawer at the hotel. Woops.

On our first trip to Italy we left ours in a gelateria in the Cinque Terre during our hike. I hope somebody got some good use out of it!

We still have all of our guides. They're a nice reminder of the trips we've taken. On our last trip we downloaded the kindle version of Rick Steves Italy, and honestly that was so much easier that we'll probably just do that from now on.

[Brit]

We keep them all. I would probably recycle them if I were allowed to make a unilateral decision on their fate, but H is a passionate travel guide hoarder. He will purposely pick guides that he thinks will look nicest on the shelf after the trip.

I drive him nuts by tearing out just the pages that I need that day so I can shove them in my purse and ditch the travel guide for the day.

[mdgirl]

Jun 19, 2014 14:05:36 GMT -5 Brit said:

I drive him nuts by tearing out just the pages that I need that day so I can shove them in my purse and ditch the travel guide for the day.

What I've done before is take a picture of the page(s) I need with my phone and use that for the day.

[Deleted]

We always get the Lonely Planet guide for a destination, and I save those. I am not a book hoarder - these are the only books I save and have a small shelf in our apartment.

Sometimes we get other guides too, and I leave those behind at our hotel for the next guests to use.

I have no explanation for this system.

[muppetinma]

I've always left them where I was traveling.

[travelingturtle]

It's been a while since I bought a guide, but I do plan to buy one again for the next big trip. I will also buy one for Germany soon - likely a DK one. Anyway, I've gotten rid of all of them except the ones I used on my honeymoon and Lonely Planet's phrasebooks. I collected those phrasebooks for a while and language doesn't change that much. I'm on the fence as to whether I want to keep those, though. This post is making me want to keep it more than I thought I did.

[Deleted]

Jun 19, 2014 15:21:36 GMT -5 @sfgal530 said:

Jun 19, 2014 7:45:46 GMT -5 RockNVoll said:

This is why I don't buy them and just borrow from the library instead. I'm not a fan of collecting books.

Completely not on topic, please come hang out with my H and teach him to be "not a fan of collecting books" because he won't part with ANYTHING.  Weeding through his books yesterday, I was like, "Do you really need 'The Big Book of Comebacks?'  We should donate that."

Guess what is sitting on my bookshelf in the office?  

This is my husband too.  He won't get rid of books that he won't possibly read again.

I do library/kindle for all of my books *except* for travel books.  I read travel books over a period of time (when planning the trip, and again when going on the trip) and like to have them flagged up, plus getting new editions usually requires a pull request from another branch so it can be hard to time them so I have them when I need them.

[GilliC]

I've started buying digital versions, since I'm taking an iPhone or iPad with me anyway. I like having PDFs because I can easily search and annotate things when I'm planning.

For my physical books, they go on my travel trophy shelf. I'll admit it. I like having a big shelf of matching books displaying all the places I've been. So many of my friends have the same that our eyes are instantly drawn to that solid-blue LP shelf and there's almost always an ensuing conversation about the places we've been or want to visit.

Since print goes out of date so quickly, and no one trusts any of LP's restaurant or hotel recs anymore (thanks to the Thomas Kohnstamms of the industry), a lot of people are just interested in having an overview of the sights and activities, so I do loan them out. Even when they're quite old. The Eyewitness guides especially, since a visually annotated walking tour doesn't really change, even after ten years.

As I have more and more of them to move (and they weigh a ton), I confess that I'm considering pulling a Lauren Conrad and turning the spines into decorative travel-trophy bookshelf storage.

[Norticprincess]

We keep them- they are all written by the time we get back - what worked/what didn't/what we'd do differently. We have them to refer back to if we go to the same place again. They do get loaned out - a lot of our friends or coworkers end up in the same places after we are back. We don't use the guidebooks for food/hotel suggestions - prices and hours on major attractions change but for a lot of places the attractions stay the same (major museums, castles, historical sites etc)

[polarbearfans]

We usually save them. The maps are usually still good and the descriptions of
sites to see. I always check the info online before going anywhere, but the books are a good staring point, and a lot have some fun bits to read.

[marytini]

I too borrow mine from the library and photocopy any important pages if I feel like I'll need them.
The only one I've purchased was The Big Island Revealed. It was a new edition released right before our trip. I sold it on Amazon after we returned.