[Image: Tourist guide to New Ephemera, Amanda Spielman].
This is an amazing idea. A tourist brochure – for a fake destination – is printed on glossy paper, then distributed in the New York subway system. Confused would-be tourists leaf through the brochure, “intrigued to learn that this island city’s leading industries are winemaking and bookbinding, and that it features a Vegetation Museum, the world’s largest flea market, ‘Pools of Certitude,’ and a natural feature known as the Subterranean Honey Baths.”
46% of its citizens are secular humanists.
Yawning commuters look in vain for flights or cruises, any way to get there at all…
Designed by Amanda Spielman, the brochure is “an aesthetic cross between McSweeney’s and Edward Tufte,” writes Metropolis. See for yourself by downloading the complete PDF.
[Image: Tourist guide to New Ephemera, Amanda Spielman].
Perhaps a small series of BLDGBLOG tourist PDFs coming soon: a rough guide to the neotropical manmade archipelago of… whatever I decide to call it.
(Thanks, Scott! See also Brand Avenue‘s brief look at the island utopia).
nice idea. though i would definately be oneof the suckas asking at penn station for the next bus to new ephemera.
also, reminds me of the dictionary of imaginary places
It also makes me think of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. A part of the world that the Kublai has not yet asimilated in to his empire.
Reminds me of this: http://www.sonsorol.org/port_watson.html