Paris Out of Hand: A Wayward Guide

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

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.

Genres: Travel, Fiction, France, Humor, Art, Fantasy, Reference

160 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1996

About the author

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, who is most well-known for her comic language handbooks The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, is also author to a collection of short stories published by Dalkey Archive Press. The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales was hailed by many critics as Rabelaisian in its humor.

Gordon resides alternately in Berkeley, California and Paris.

from http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/...

Reviews

[Kelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get ready to inhale Paris! This is a wonderfully perfect guidebook to Paris, by heart. In order to really appreciate it, you must approach with complete and reckless abandon...thus, solid preparation for your visit to the city of lights.

What other guidebook tells you about hotels that are open to both guests and their doppelgängers (Hotel Des Strangers)? Gives you an inside scoop into restaurants where the dishes are assembled by blindfolded chefs (Le Cadavre Exquis)? Or, suggests a good place to buy a pair of designer jeans embroidered avec your favorite poem (Arse Poetica)?

Who knows which places are real and which places are fictional--and who cares? The irreverence of this book was enough for me to fall in love with Paris all over again!


Je suis un ange vachement assoiffé...

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found the book amusing, and I am a fan of Nick Bantock but didn't feel the need to read this whole book. I sort of skimmed around and that was enough.

[Michael Rowley · Rating 1 out of 5]

My son lives in Paris and I bought this as a gift for him. It's beautifully designed with help from the guy who did the Griffin and Sabine books. Sadly, I was disappointed. It came across as arcane blurbs that were neither insightful nor entertaining.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is delightful if you know Paris at all. If you don't, then you may be confused or you may think it is non-fiction. Of course, if you do know Paris, you will certainly know that there is a lot of truth in some of the wonderful descriptions of fantasy hotels and restaurants.

[Joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautifully illustrated, imaginary guide to Paris; the written descriptions were just not all that appealing to me.

[Dianne Trautmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my third or fourth reading of this mock travel guide. I love to savor the descriptions of this faux Paris and compare it with my own memories of this fascinating city. If there is any place that could contain such strange and whimsical places it is surely Paris and this guide will take you there.

[Tal]

@thomas - i loved it.
the perfect companion to my wayward wanderings through the city - augmenting the magicreality that i always find myself finding in paris, through my own thick lenses of imagination & wonder...
thank you. dearly.

[Ellie · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stars are for graphic design, some sidebar quotes by real people, and a few nice illustrations. The aforementioned deserves more than 2 stars. I really disliked the text, which was in essence an imaginary travel guide: faux entries in hotel registers, all told in the same haughty voice, ridiculous descriptions of cafes, nightlife, shopping, etc., again none of it real, laced with sarcasm and double-entendres which are intended to be funny or make the readers congratulate themselves for "getting it." Even an entry from a 160 year old corpse who had complains about who was buried in the cemetery after her death. Everything is told in a mocking tone. I thought this would be a nice diversion while sheltering in place from a pandemic, but instead it was mostly a waste of time.

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn’t a book you read from cover to cover. I picked it up from time to time over a few years. And what a pleasure to pick up it was—its deep red cloth cover, its heavy pages with rounded corners, its ornate endpapers, its lovely typography and period illustrations throughout in antique ink colors. The target market is the utterly impractical tourist, anyone fascinated by obscure symbols, absurd ideas, strange quotations, and clever wordplay. Amusement, not significance, was foremost in the production of this book.

My only beef is that such an arch-literate misguidebook, deriving most of its humor from scintillating jeux de mots, should stoop so low as to translate nearly every French phrase. Presumably anyone reading this book would have enough basic knowledge of France (not to mention common sense) to know that “artisans” means “craftspeople” and that the “entrée” in France is the first course. Humor is destroyed when it is explained, and the reader finds herself unnecessarily patronized.

Still, this annoyance can be overlooked in the mischievous romp through a Paris of fantasy, where the Hôtel Hélas hands out handkerchiefs with the room key and provides waterproof pens, and where you can choose between the Métro Marquis de Sade with its spiked seats or the Auto da Fée taxi service to convey you from the Folies Berbères nightclub to the Parc les Chênes Andalous.

[Rosminah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was great fun to read through. I was living in England, already poking through used book shops for old Baedekers, and thinking about a trip to the mainland. I was dirt poor, but got this for myself as a little treat. It was one of those things that, because of the sacrifice and struggle to acquire, made it that much more valuable to have.
This is not the kind of book to read from front to back, it's a guide, so a page here and a page there are fine. So I picked away at it.
And I credit this book for piquing my initial interest in these mysterious "profiteroles." Now, they are one of my favorite desserts, I cannot say no to profiteroles.
Now that I have been to Paris a number of times, this guide is even more fun to read.

[Manik Sukoco · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an unusual way to spend a day, month, or maybe just an hour at one of the many strange & somewhatout of this world cafe's & hotels. You would think that maybe that wrong turn you took ended up being on another planet besides earth, so what! These places are so much fun and entertaining than why worry if a person is on some other solar system ! The characters & places are never boring, I can say that I was entertained through out this entire book. I would recommend it to anyone

[Frances Sawaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

We took this to read while we were on one of our Paris trips: helped to not take the place too seriously! Funny and clever with great sketches by Nick Bantock (long a favourite of mine). For some reason I kept flashing on the Steinbeck novel with virtually the same concept.Off-road adventures might be best!

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very bizarre... its like Paris on an acid trip and I suspect this is a lot of "inside" jokes that I didn't get. But very cool like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. If you like Nick Bantock you will love the visuals.

[Pewterbreath · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the best flip through book there is. Interesting and clever--it is such an amusement. Meant to be in everyone's house. The book is also physically beautiful.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A travelers guide to Paris with alot of fascinating information. Great read even if you never plan to go to Paris.

[Degan Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted this book for such a little ng time based on the idea of travel writing combined with collage but it is instead a somewhat interesting book about places (hotels, cafes, restaurants, etc.) in Paris, written with a punner’s / language nerd’s / literalist’s delight with a bit of design at the edges. I was disappointed.

[JoAnna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three-line review: This tongue-and-cheek guide to Paris felt like an inside joke I didn't understand. I picked this book up at a used bookstore, but it was neither funny nor entertaining to read. It gets two stars instead of one because I love the hard-copy version, which features illustrations and imagery masterfully created with an array of whimsical ephemera.

[1unaaaaa · Rating 2 out of 5]

the stars are mainly for the lovely hard cover and amazing graphic design, this is the second time I borrowed this book from the library and was hoping to give it another chance to finish it. Turns out I realized I don't need to read the whole book. It's odd and quite amusing, just not my kind of book... I feel like it's a inside joke that I do not understand,which is sad.

[Engel Dreizehn · Rating 4 out of 5]

On very strange, surreal and satired humor take on an alternate world Paris...it was very an interesting if weird trip.

[Karin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really imaginative and clever but just wasn't what I'm needing to read right now.

[sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

such a cool idea! i want to go to paris now and look at all these nonexistent places 🧸

[Andrew Emerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully weird book. You can tell the author and the artists had a hoot creating this.

[Lori Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book many years ago because I was on a Nick Bantock kick and he helped illustrate this book.

The book is hilarious, with a dry-wit, tongue-in-cheek, irreverant at times sense of humor. It resembles a travel guide to Paris, but it's definitely not going to get you around the Paris anyone knows.

The book is broken down into sections, covering hotels, restaurants, nightlife, and the like. Hotels starts out with a key, and here is your first clue that the book is going to be a hoot. For instance, there is a symbol for:

*Bidet in the middle of the room
*Fezzes not required in public areas
*Angora busboys
*Beds turned down, chocolates left on pillow
*Beds turned down, fish left on pillow

And so it goes for two pages.

One of the hotels has no elevator because one of the ROOMS is IN the elevator. One restaurant only serves food that begins with the letter "P", and one restaurant only serves after 100 women are present, and if at any time that number decreases, the waiters stop in mid-step until another walks through the door. This means that women walking by the restaurant (or men in drag) run the risk of being kidnapped and fed a nice meal.

The drawings in the book are also a delight, and the only reason I gave the book four stars is because it got a little bogged down towards the end. But it's definitely a departure from the norm, and therefore absolutely worth finding a copy and reading it.

Lori Anderson

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[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this up at the library, mistakenly thinking it was a guide to obscure and offbeat Parisian sites and attractions. It is instead a satirical guide to the spirit of Paris, with a cultural, artistic, linguistic, and literary bent. The humor is mostly an homage to Surrealism and Absurdism.

When I read this I was not in the right frame of mind for it or indeed any other sort of humor book. Author Karen Elizabeth Gordon's jokes seem to me to be built on very thin premises, then stretched and dragged out to degrees I find irritating and tiresome. Her writing style is so verbose and of such Byzantine complexity that it sucks out whatever life her gags might contain, with the result that I didn't think this tiny, 160-page book would ever end.

I wanted to like the book, but its insistence upon its own cleverness pushed me away.

[C-shaw · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really bought this book for my sister's birthday present, but decided to read it first. It was so disappointing that I didn't give it to her after all. Pooh. Good premise, bad follow-through, but nice illustrations. This book is a real stinker.

[Madelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The symbol for "excellent service" might be familiar to some, ooh la la. This book is hilarious and makes me actually interested in Paris (that's right, I'm not QUITE that type of intellectual)

[Jennifer Chin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute and quirky - don't use it as a real guide in Paris, though.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, hilarious. If only some of the places in this book were real...!

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining, surrealistic guide to the City of Lights.

[Terrie Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome and different kind of wacky story!!!