From Guidebooks to Globes: Geographia Offers Travelers Aid

Sometimes the trip is the worst part of traveling.

After all, it is only when you are actually on the road that you can lose your luggage, order a dish that turns out to be roast joint of a small whiskered mammal or find yourself in a nation where the telephone is a largely decorative object.

Before you set out, you can take the perfect trip in your head. And once you are safely home again, even the most nerve-jangling journey undergoes a benign sea change. Short of emergency surgery or incarceration in a Middle Eastern prison, the vagaries of travel are uniformly amusing in retrospect. The street urchins who picked your pocket on the Left Bank are as photogenic as the Taj Mahal.

Located at 4000 Riverside Drive on the border of Burbank and Toluca Lake, Geographia is a store for people who know that the planning and remembering part of travel is at least as pleasurable as the part that involves packing. Like a handful of similar specialty stores on the Westside, Geographia stocks maps, globes, guidebooks, travel memoirs and accessories. It is, in short, a nearby place where you can imagine being far away.

Geographia is also the sort of place where you can pick up a Bra Stash, an item that allows women travelers to hide their money in the fashion that their mothers have been nagging them to do since they got their first passports (although neither Mom nor the manufacturer addresses the question of how the public will respond a traveler’s fumbling for her cash in the recesses of her blouse).

Guides to Unpaved Roads

It has international travel clocks that look like calculators and show the time in Rome when you press the flag of Italy. It has shields to keep your film from getting fried in airport X-ray machines and guides to the unpaved roads of Southern California, as hard as it is to imagine someone traveling the unpaved roads of Southern California except at gunpoint.

Brian Draper, 36, who lives in Burbank, opened the shop two years ago. As geographers are trained to do, Draper, a geography graduate of Cal State Northridge, chose the spot carefully. He reasoned, correctly, that the nearby film and TV studios would provide him with a steady stream of peripatetic customers.

“I’ve found a lot of unexpected benefits of being near the studios,” Draper said. As any filmgoer knows, no actor can play Hitler without a globe to twirl covetously. And wall maps are popular props as well, routinely featured in shows dealing with war, crime and education. Maps and globes from the shop regularly show up in the CBS series “Murder, She Wrote,” Draper noted. Moreover, “screenwriters buy guidebooks for reference, and location scouts come in and buy picture books to help them get the feel of different places,” he said.

Globes are among the most popular items in the store, according to Draper. He stocks more than 30 kinds--lunar and celestial globes as well as the more familiar terrestrial ones. Small desk models cost less than $8. Floor models with brass and oak stands run as high as $500.

Draper has illuminated globes that go from a physical globe, showing mountains, rivers and other physical features, to a political globe, showing national borders, with a flick of a switch.

Demonstrate Knowledge

One of his most unusual globes has a surface like that of a blackboard: The user can demonstrate his or her knowledge of geography with a piece of chalk. Draper discovered it in the catalogue of an educational supplies firm.

Draper said he first became interested in geography as a child. When he was 7 or 8, his grandmother began giving him stamps. “That’s what made me curious about all this,” he said, gesturing toward the thousands of maps that fill the shop.

Like other students of the world, Draper has heard the stories about America’s geographic ignorance. According to a 1988 Gallup survey commissioned by the National Geographic Society, 45% of the American adults polled could not locate Central America on a map and one-third could not locate Vietnam.

But Draper said his clients tend to be sophisticated travelers with an informed sense of where they are going and where they are. Occasionally, he said, but not often, someone will come and say, “I’m getting this wall map for my boss because he’s geographically illiterate, and it makes me crazy.”

Draper said travel books are his best-selling items. Geographia stocks scores of standard guidebooks, including Baedeker’s, favored by serious sightseers; Frommer’s, for cost-conscious travelers, and Fodor’s, which includes information about accommodations for lottery winners and expense-account travelers.

Bibendum Replicas

Both the red and green Michelin guides are available. And for the rabid Michelin enthusiast, Draper stocks foot-high replicas of Bibendum, the Michelin Tire Man. He began stocking the dolls, which look like marshmallows with delusions of grandeur, when a customer asked if he could buy the doll that Draper had been given for advertising purposes. “Apparently truck drivers in France put them on their hoods as ornaments,” Draper said.

In the past, people planning a trip used to pore over guidebooks. Today, Draper said, many people come in and rent or buy video travelogues before choosing a destination.

Tastes in travel literature have also changed. Instead of wide-eyed accounts of alien wonders, acerbic travel memoirs are in favor. Draper said his customers especially like P.J. O’Rourke’s “Holidays in Hell” and John Krich’s “Music in Every Room: Around the World in a Bad Mood.”

Draper has only one reservation about his geographic enterprise. Running a business leaves him little time to travel.