Time travel trip to Paris on $15

Paris: Then and Now
by Peter & Oriel Caine
Thunder Bay Press
Published 2003






If you've been in Costco around Christmas-time or peruse the Barnes and Noble bargin shelves, you've probably seen a book from this series at some time. They have these books for several major cities. I coerced my parents into getting it for me one Christmas, but I've not really sat and read all the captioning until now. So I spent Bastille Day reading through this book.

The book begins with a short introduction, which briefly describes how Emperor Napoleon III began to clean up, rebuild and enlarge Paris by annexing outlying villages. This is around the same time as photography had gained popularity.

For the rest of the book, there is a historic photograph, with a blurb about the area, and what is happening in the photograph. On the facing page is the current (as of publishing) photograph of the same area, with a discription of how it currently is, and how it had changed since the historic photograph. While it includes pictures of the popular tourist sites, like L'Arc de Triomphe, and Sacre Coeur, but various stations, markets and streets as well. There were also little tidbits of history in it, that made me realize that I didn't know much about French history.

Found on the Guardian's coverage of the 100th anniversary of the 1910 flood

This is one of those in the book, of the Rue de Lyons, during the floods of 1910. The Metro also flooded at that time, and the caption says the "Water level had risen to twenty-seven feet" in the center of the city.

Its a nice coffee table book, and if you want a short pictoral getaway



-------------------------------------

I just got a Google+ account, so you can find me here. I've also made it so the buttons show on posts.