From Ireland to Iyer: Inside Condé Nast Traveler’s 20th Anniversary Issue

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 09.12.07 | 9:18 AM ET

Congrats to Condé Nast Traveler on its 20th anniversary, which the magazine celebrates this month with an issue that shows off the purveyor of glossy travel porn at its best. At 400-plus pages it’s got dumbbell-like heft—I did a few curls reading it on the train from Washington D.C. to New York yesterday—and it examines the state of travel now and during the past 20 years through the eyes of, among others, Pico Iyer and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, whose quote on the cover reads, “I believe that those of us who have had the benefit of lots of foreign travel have an obligation to share what we think we know with our fellow citizens.”

It’s not the type of sentiment I typically associate with CNT, which regularly features slick photo spreads of $1,400-a-night lodging and fashion accessories. Those things are in the 20th anniversary issue, too—one baffling fashion feature, for instance, focuses on a little black dress doubling as a matador’s cape—but overall the issue contains an abundance of excellent travel stories.

Among the great reads:

* Pico Iyer’s nine commandments of travel writing. No. 8: “The true travel writer does not listen to a place but talks back to it; he’s drawn to it by compulsion.”

* Iyer reminisces about his earliest days as a travel writer, doing Europe on $1,400 for 70 days as a Let’s Go contributor.

* The 86 greatest travel books of all time, as selected by a group of writers including Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, Nell Freudenberger, Francine Prose and World Hum contributor Tom Bissell. Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger, In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson and The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain are among the eight books that made the CNT list as well as World Hum’s 2006 countdown of the 30 best travel books.

* Patricia Storace tags along with President Clinton as he travels the world as a philanthropist. Clinton says: “I never get tired of traveling—I’m always learning something new.”

* An experiment in the re-branding of six nations by six design companies.

* A look at the challenges and rewards of being an ethical traveler, including an ethical scorecard of travel by a Conde Nast Traveler reporter graded by three experts, including World Hum contributor and the Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, Jeff Greenwald.

* Wendy Perrin’s list of her 30 best travel secrets.

* The story of Mark Schatzker’s efforts to circumnavigate the globe in 80 days without flying. He also blogged about his efforts earlier this year.

The unlinked stories are not available online.