View a gallery of images from the book by visiting the link under 'Multimedia' below

Burton Holmes was one of the world's greates travellers, and one of the first travel photographers, bringing the things he found to life on film and through photographs from the turn of the 20th century until 1952.

It was a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes began a lifelong journey to bring the world home.

From the grand boulevards of Paris to China’s Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Holmes made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. He holds the record for the longest-running one-man run in American show business, giving over 8,000 lectures.

Holmes roamed the globe throughout the summer and crossed the United States in the winter, transforming the lecture tradition into an entertaining show. He coined the term “travelogue” in 1904 to advertise his performance and thrilled audiences with two-hour sets of stories timed to projections of colour slides and some of the first “moving pictures.”

He visited every continent and nearly every country on the planet, shooting over 30,000 photographs and nearly 500,000 feet of film. The book represents the best of the Holmes archive, providing a window on the world of a century ago.

Travelogues: Burton Holmes, The Greatest Traveler of His Time, 1892-1952, is published by Taschen, priced £29.99. Order it from BooksFirst for £26.99 including delivery

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