If you’re not familiar with Miroslav Sasek’s travel books for children, you should be. Filled with colourful pictures and facts about cities around the world, the books are beautiful and interesting. And not just for children.
But children do enjoy them!
A Czech writer and illustrator, Sasek was first inspired to write about Paris, condensing the key sites, history, and interesting tidbits about the city in a format both endearing and easy to read. Thus, travel books for children!
We currently have four of the series (as pictured above), each from cities we’ve been to and enjoyed. I purchased This is Hong Kong years ago and often displayed it on the coffee table (before Pearl was around/old enough to grab everything off the coffee table).
Guests often seemed to enjoy flipping through the pages.
Originally published in the 1960s, most of the series has been re-released as of the early 2000s. While the original information and illustrations are all there, the books now include footnotes to tell the reader what’s changed since Sasek first wrote his books.
The series includes several major European cities, as well as a book about Australia and a couple in the United States. Sadly, Sasek never did one for his own city (and my favourite European city) of Prague.
For now, Pearl enjoys the colourful pictures but I hope that as she gets older, her dad and I will be able to share our own stories of some of the places we’ve been to and spark her interest in seeing the world.
Karissa Reads Books 
Love this series. I didn’t realize we have this collection in common! We have the San Francisco and Australia books (and I’ve been meaning to pick up This Is London). We collect them for the same reason – places we’ve been. Though I’ve thought to myself that it would be interesting to look at the other books (maybe one day to travel there!) so I’ll have to check out your copies 🙂
That’s so great that you have some too! I kind of like that we have different books in the series. We’ll have to look at each others’ (I was thinking of getting San Francisco).