BEHIND THE SCENES: THE AROUND THE WORLD AND BACK AGAIN COVER
Last year—and by year, I mean the decade that was 2020—my husband and I were an hour from boarding a flight to Portugal when the first Covid-19 travel ban was issued. It was early March and 11 PM at JFK, and we stood there blearily trying to parse the garbled language in the order before pulling our bags from the flight and deciding to find a silver lining in a New York vacation instead. Over the course of the next few days, we kept a wary eye on the headlines abroad from a room in a fancy hotel in Midtown—which we got at a ridiculously low rate we now refer to as the “apocalypse special”—and had just enough time to eat some incredible food and be thoroughly freaked out by the ghost streets of the city before hightailing it home as we all collectively realized that the virus was about to take over our lives.
Once you’ve got the travel bug, it never relents; and as my heart broke over and over again for all the places around the world hit hard by the virus, I pulled out some old draft pages I had made for a potential travel journal. In those bleary, scary, bizarre early days of quarantine, I leaned into having something to do that connected me to the rest of the world. Through our first stay-at-home-order, through my husband getting laid off from his job due to the pandemic, through the toilet paper shortage and the flour shortage and the 24 hours where we became weirdly obsessed with origami and then never picked it up again, I worked on the draft pages little by little. By the time we’d moved on from origami to baking croissants, I’d submitted the draft pages to my editor at TarcherPerigee, and by the time the croissants had turned into pound after pound of fresh pasta—and yes, I mean that both ways—the book was starting to take shape as I wrote the manuscript and drew all 160 pages, mining my favorite travel memories and photos from over the years and digging deep into what I missed most about the rest of the world.
And now—it’s finished! And you guys, the finished book is without a doubt the best thing I’ve ever made. It’s exactly what I set out to create: the travel journal that I wish existed. It’s full of writing prompts for digging deeper, fun ways to pass the time in transit, and activities to help you reflect on your travel experiences and dream up new adventures. The illustrations in the book were drawn from my own travel photos and the content was heavily influenced by the incredible time I was lucky enough to spend living abroad. And I’m so, so excited to share it with you all as the world starts to slowly open back up again.
The book is out September 7, preorders are open now (yay!), and we have a beeeeautiful cover design I can finally share here along with a fun look behind the scenes! The cover is a colored-in version of a page of the book, with a fun postcard design added for the title and subtitle. (That’s something I’m extra excited about—I used to collect postcards as a kid, and tack them up all over the walls of my room. Just one of many signs I would someday make a book about travel!) Anyway, the page of the book that became the cover was drawn from a favorite travel photo of mine, and there’s a neat story behind it.
When my now-husband and I traveled to Italy in 2015, it was our first international trip together, and it was my secret test to be absolutely positive he was The One. (What, was I supposed to marry someone before I knew how well we traveled together? Insanity.) This was the final test, and even just a couple days into the trip, we’d said yes to all the same restaurants and no to all the same museums, gotten tired at exactly the same times, wanted to do all the same activities, and just generally had an absolute blast. I knew, and apparently Nate knew too, because we were enjoying a beautiful view over the rooftops of Siena when he got down on one knee, and after spending the previous weeks repeatedly rehearsing the bare basics of Italian in order to be able to politely order pasta around three times a day, I was so surprised and excited I accidentally said yes in Italian. We spent the rest of the trip in a dreamy gelato-infused haze—which may have been why we happily wandered around Cinque Terre for so long that we accidentally got a parking ticket, which we had no idea how to pay because it was in more-advanced-than-ordering-pasta Italian. (Oops.) This photo was taken that day, and it’s a favorite travel photo of mine for all of the above reasons and because it feels so evocative of what it felt like to be there that day: the colors, the beautiful weather, the sea. Heaven! Absolute heaven.
I carefully redrew the photo for one of the coloring pages in the book, and when it came time to choose a cover, this was the one that stood out. We added colors that felt like a good fit for the teal interior of the book and were also a little nod to the vintage-map color schemes I love so much. And voila! The cover for Around the World and Back Again, out September 7 of 2021!
I can’t wait to share more with you as we get closer to publication day, and I really can’t wait to see where you take this book with you once it’s out. You can preorder your copy right here—and if you have any questions about the book or if you just want to share your best travel stories, give me a shout. Until next time!
Cheers,
Kate