Arthur Frommer at RolfPotts.com

This month at the RolfPotts.com Travel Writers page I interview travel guidebook legend Arthur Frommer. Here are some of the highlights from our Q&A:

• “My biggest challenge is to keep my own eyes and consciousness fresh. I’ve realized that there was such a thing as too much travel, which causes you to be jaded. There was a moment when my plane landed at the airport of Amsterdam one day and I didn’t even take my eyes away from the book that I was reading because I was as familiar with Amsterdam as I was with my own home city. And I suddenly realized that that’s not the mood with which travelers approach a new destination — travel is exciting and novel and somewhat bewildering. And it’s very important, even for an experienced travel writer: not to become jaded and not to relax, but to keep in mind the tingling excitement that most tourists feel when they encounter a foreign destination for the first time.”
• “The challenges are to be of real service to the traveler. Too much travel writing is simply an exercise on the part of the writer that is of no relevance to the person reading the information. If there is anything that has distinguished our travel guides and my blog from all the other travel guides and blogs, it’s that we are constantly striving to be of real service and assistance to the public. We are constantly striving to describe those destinations — those travel experiences — which a large number of Americans will find of relevance to their lives.”
• “When the Internet came about, and it was suggested that we place the content of our travel guides onto the Internet, I was quite apprehensive. I kept thinking that we were committing suicide, that we were eliminating the need to buy a travel guide. And yet that hasn’t happened. With all the material that appears on the Internet — with the ease with which people can obtain the very same text that appears in a printed travel guide — the sale of printed travel guides has not been affected in the slightest.”
• “Anybody who is a talented travel writer will be discovered, and has more than adequate outlets for his writing. If a person wants to write about travel, they should immediately sit down and write about aspects of their own community. They can do a chapter on the hotel situation in Cincinnati or Milwaukee — or wherever they live — and submit that to the various travel sections of the newspapers. If it is good, it will be published. It will be seen, and you will build up enough of a dossier of published articles to obtain a job as a travel writer for magazines or for book publishers.”

Full Arthur Frommer interview online here.