Idlewild Books is New York City’s only travel bookstore and one of the last in the country. David Del Vecchio, who worked as a press officer for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations, opened Idlewild in 2008. Here Del Vecchio talks about the ways fiction reveals a country as much as its maps and lists of museums: “It’s a lot more exciting for us to see someone walk out with a book of short stories from Vietnam as well as a Lonely Planet than to just sell them a stack of guidebooks.” 

How would you describe Idlewild Books to the uninitiated?

Idlewild was the original name of New York International Airport (changed to JFK in December 1963). Idlewild Books has a similar mission: to transport people to other countries and cultures. We’re a bookstore organized by country, with travel guides, fiction, and nonfiction shelved side by side. In the Argentina section, for example, you’ll find a mix of travel guides, novels by classic and contemporary writers such as Cortázar, Ocampo, and Aira, and nonfiction such as The Argentina Reader and the Chatwin classic In Patagonia. We’re also a language school, with 7-week courses in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese. Our classes are taught by native speakers and range from beginner courses for travelers to film and conversation classes for more advanced students. 

If Idlewild were a religion, what would be its icons and tenets?

Oh wow. Well, I guess our physical icons would be a well-thumbed book, with addresses and phone numbers and maybe foreign vocabulary scrawled in ink in the margins, and a map or a globe, and maybe a knapsack. And the tenets would be to be curious and humble and to know that there are infinite ways of seeing and thinking. To learn a new language, you have to let go of what you know (in our case, English) and try to think and express yourself in a way that is unfamiliar. And to see a new place or culture clearly, you have to do the same.

How does Idlewild measure its success as a travel bookstore? 

Like most independent bookstores, we love to help people discover books they didn’t know existed and would not have stumbled upon in another store or online. And when it comes to travel, we believe that a novel by a local writer can tell you more about a culture than a guidebook. So even though guides make up a big part of our book sales, we measure our success as a travel bookstore by the number of nonguidebooks we sell. 

What trends are you noticing among readers?

In travel guides, there’s a trend away from mass guides that cover everything toward more local, curated experiences. It mirrors the way that many travelers are moving away from hotels to renting an apartment through Airbnb. For example, there’s a series called Citix60 where they ask 60 local “creatives” (artists, designers, photographers, etc.) the places they hang out in their home city, which is great because the places they recommend are often just regular neighborhood-y spots that are more typical than the cafe in the center that a mass guide might recommend. Other new city guides, like LOST iN and Wildsam, mix recommendations with interviews with locals, short essays by famous writers from that city, and so on. 

What is your favorite all-time travel book?

Hands down, it’s An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie. It’s a travel memoir about a young man from a small village in Togo who stumbles upon a book about Eskimos in a bookstore, becomes obsessed, and spends several years working his way across West Africa and Europe until he finally achieves his dream of visiting Greenland. It’s utterly unique because it’s about the interaction of two cultures most of us know nothing about, but it also has adventure, sex, humor, vivid descriptions of beauty and squalor alike, and everything else you’d want in a travelogue. 

Karen Schechner is the vice president of Kirkus Indie.